Cobweb Forest (Cobweb Bride Trilogy) (33 page)

Where are we going?
she thought.
Are these poor people going to be fighting the Trovadii? It will be slaughter
. . . .

And then she thought,
Will I have strength enough to put down so many dead to their final rest, in order to give these living men a fighting chance?

The next moment she saw Lady Leonora.

Or I can simply take care of the Cobweb Bride. Do it now, swiftly. . . . If I take her—right now—will all those who are dead already fall like dominoes? With one single act that restarts death, would it put them all to rest? Or would it still require a great mass effort of will to kill them, each one by one
—

“Percy Ayren!”

Lady Jelavie San Quellenne approached, wearing her full suit of armor, and her sword. Her helm was held in the crook of one arm, but her bronze-red head of hair was covered by a tightly-fitting coif hood of chain mail. The oval of her face that was bared to the elements was already reddened from the cold, and the expression of her brown eyes, sharp as daggers.

Percy turned to her. “Good morning, My Lady—”

“It is a foul morning. Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Your fearsome knave, paramour—whatever you would have me call it—the Black Knight! He is wanted by the Duke in the main tent, for they are discussing last minute field assignments—”

“He is tending his warhorse, Jack, right over there—”

Suddenly there were screams coming from beyond the trees to the south. Screams, followed by running men, women and children, and harsh cries of soldiers, and the clanging of steel . . . and the beat of approaching drums.

“Trovadii! We have been seen! They are coming!”

Lady Jelavie whirled around and drew steel. She held a long powerful sword in both hands, balancing with her feet in the snow, and took a graceful step forward to shield Percy.

“To Arms! To Arms!” the cries of Goraque sergeants and commanders echoed throughout the campsite. “Goraque, to Arms!”

There were flashes of pomegranate red up ahead, and bristling long pikes moving relentlessly forward.

Percy stood in place, staring. She saw the running women and the ground churning underneath their feet, the crawling dead.
 . . .

In the next instant, Beltain was there, his own great sword drawn, and Jack on a lead behind him.

“Percy!” he exclaimed, and then seeing her safe, his face showed relief. Seeing the Lady San Quellenne with her sword bared, he gave her a quick nod of gratitude.

“The Duke wanted to see you
 . . . in the war tent, My Lord!” Jelavie blurted. “But now, now it matters no longer, for the fight is upon us!”

“Mount up!” Beltain exclaimed, and in the next moment he was in the saddle, and then pulling up Percy before him.

Lady Jelavie nodded, then ran for her own grey warhorse a few feet away. She flew up into the saddle with the lightness of an experienced rider, and then she was away toward the Tanathe fires to assist her people.

Percy was squeezed against Beltain’s chest, and he was hastily moving his vambrace-clad arms, adjusting his armor plates and pulling his shield up, while the flashes of red in the sparse trees drew nearer.

“Percy, hang on . . . yes, hold your hands here on the armor rings—”

And then they were galloping.

“Fall back!” A small group of Goraque knights, about half a dozen, came bursting through past a snowy rise, from the other side of the camp, kicking up snow, and then one warhorse stumbled, screaming, almost falling over the moving limbs of the dead that emerged from the snow. The knight hung on, but just barely. . . .

Percy reached out with her death sense, and the forest rang in her mind, and everything was familiar tolling darkness. She could feel them, individual deaths of the oncoming Trovadii, and the ones crawling underneath the snow.

She plucked them, like strings, testing them, in the vicinity of about thirty feet around them. And then a thought came to her—now would be a good time to try the act of granting death, only accompanied with the vision of white light and the White Bridegroom. Indeed, why did she not think of it before? Here was a chance to test her ability to do it correctly, before she tried it upon the Cobweb Bride. . . .

Percy reached for a random dead man, a foot soldier wearing the red of blood, and she took his death shadow, and as she guided it into his corpse she visualized Lord Death in blinding white—

There was a strange retinal flash in her own vision, and for a moment Percy was
blinded
, both physically and on the inside, in her death sense.

It flared and sputtered, and instead of putting the dead man to his final rest, he was released from her mind’s grasp like a wooden puppet and then continued exactly as he was, moving forward in formation, holding his long heavy pike before him.
 . . .

It was not working!

Percy’s heart began to pound in her temples.

Beltain noticed her intent stare, noticed there was something wrong, because she almost ceased breathing.

“Are you all right? What happened?” he spoke in her ear, while directing Jack over craggy areas covered with snow and shrubbery.

“I—” Percy could not speak.

People in the camp were running, foot soldiers and villagers, and dogs scrambling from underfoot, away from the great warhorse. A woman holding up her old mother stumbled, and was lifted up by two Goraque infantrymen, and then they pushed past the women, onward.

Beltain carefully circled back about a hundred feet, taking them to the original place they had camped, and just in time, for the Count D’Arvu and his family were in danger from an approaching tight formation of the enemy.

“What now?” Percy managed to speak, her head reeling. “Oh, Beltain, we need to make sure of Leonora’s safety! Nothing must happen to her, not until I can put her to rest properly! She must not be harmed!”

And then she blurted out to him the rest of what had happened at Death’s Keep, and how Death was too week to do the deed and it was up to her.

Beltain listened grimly then nodded, saying, “Fear not, we’ll look after her. . . .”

He stopped Jack before the Count and Countess and Leonora, who were huddled together with their servants and a small group of the San Quellenne.

“Set me down . . .” whispered Percy. “I’ll only be in your way as you fight.”

“But I cannot protect you if you—”

“Set me down, Beltain! I’ll protect them my own way, and I’ll protect
you
also!”

“Damn it to Hell!” Beltain exhaled in grim intensity. And then he looked at Percy with a hard impossible gaze, and he gently helped her down from the saddle.

“Be careful! Stay together, all of you! Do not move from this spot!” His baritone rang, and he turned to face the oncoming Trovadii.

Percy stumbled slightly in the snow, then came to stand before Leonora and her parents, and she gave them a brief reassuring smile. “The Black Knight has never been beaten in battle
 . . .” she said. “He will protect us all!”

While I will protect him
. . . .

Count Lecrant was not a fighting man, but he drew out a short gentleman’s sword. “If it comes to it, I will try to do my best to protect you also.”

But Percy was barely listening. She tentatively reached out with her death sense, for she could feel them all around, encroaching, the thousands upon thousands and more beyond the trees. She had to make sure she still had the means to do what had to be done, with or without the white light searing her mind.

A dead man’s arm burst through the snow directly at their feet, and Lady Arabella stifled a cry.

Percy reached for him in her old way, and she easily plucked the death shadow and stuffed it into the cold dead flesh.

The dead man ceased moving, was a cold lifeless thing.

But in that same instant she felt someone reach out to her from a distance, in the same manner as she reached out to the dead.

Only this was a living touch, and one she had known once before.

Persephone!

The dark Goddess was inside her mind.

A
ll morning and afternoon Letheburg was besieged by the forces of winter, heavy relentless storm winds and overcast dark grey skies—although it was notably odd that the cold had lessened almost overnight, and the snow started melting all along the rooftops, clinging impossibly to all surfaces despite the gale force wind blowing upon it. . . .

Whatever it was, King Roland Osenni of Lethe had had quite enough.

After what had transpired on the battlements, and the other impossible strange events still happening below—massing armies, goddesses out of classical mythology, flashes of lighting, light-radiating golden figures, darkness-exuding shadowed figures, inexplicable elemental weather patterns and—and, oh yes indeed, the revelation of that flibbertigibbet and meddler Grial as the Goddess Hecate, followed by
his own
magical ascension up into the air like one of the blessed angels—His Majesty swiftly ordered his guards to get him “as far away as possible from the unnatural sorcery and madness” as he called it.

Thus he hastily left the large bulwark where he had seen Grial, or, blast her, Hecate,
create
two new deities out of the Infanta of the Realm and that infernal marquis who had killed her and now followed her around like a lovelorn hound—for yes, the King had his suspicions in that direction. . . . And then the two of them, all sparkling white and very much immortal, disappeared somewhere, while Grial—that is, Hecate—gave the King a nod and told him to have a lovely afternoon, and then disappeared also. . . .

King Roland Osenni moved carefully along the parapet walkway, keeping to the inside of the safety barrier, and was about to start his careful descent from the walls along the snowed-over slippery stairs (with a guard directly behind and two in front in case he fell) when a strange deep rumble sounded for leagues around.

The deep bass sound was so low that it felt as if a mountain had scraped its foundation against rock and had shifted and settled into a new location. It sent up black specks of winter birds screaming up into the skies.

At the same time, the heavens overhead—late afternoon, but already as dark as evening—seemed to reflect the passing of a great sky-sized shadow sweeping across its cloud-covered sphere. For a few moments the layers of storm cloud thick as cotton shimmered with an unnatural chromatic iridescence, and then it was gone.

Alarmed exclamations of patrolling soldiers resounded all around the battlements.

“Your Majesty!” One of his captains was on the top of the stair, and he was pointing outside the walls. “Wait, Your Majesty! You might want to see this!”

The King grunted, and then turned around with a sinking feeling in his gut, and started back up the few slippery stairs that he had descended. A soldier offered him the spyglass, and the King was assisted onto another raised spot on the walkway that was higher up, so that he could look out without crossing the magical safety barrier in the middle. “What is it that I am looking at? What was that horrendous sound?”

But he peered through the telescope lens, and he stopped breathing.

Beyond the outer walls of Letheburg, where moments ago had been a plain covered with Trovadii pomegranate color and endless enemy army formations unto the horizon, only about two hundred feet away now hulked a strange massive shape cast in shadow, vaguely granite or possibly cream-yellow chalk slate. It resembled a mountain in the mist, a mountain with its top flattened or cut off to form a plateau, which—as he swept the spyglass across—seemed to have strange regular man-made demarcations on the top, that very much resembled crenels and merlons of a great city bulwark and battlements similar to those of Letheburg itself. . . .

Roland Osenni’s mind attempted to process the sensory information that his eyes provided, but frankly it was incomprehensible. “What is it?” he muttered. “That thing! What is it that I see? A mirage? A reflection of our own walls? Would someone tell me
what is out there?
And where did it come from?” His voice ended in a yell.

A soldier nearby, also peering through a spyglass, said, “This is very hard to believe, Your Majesty, but I think that’s the actual outer walls of the citadel at Silver Court. I recognize the shape of the parapets and beyond it some of the interior landmarks in the distance.
 . . . There’s the dome of the Basilica Dei Coello—”

“What?”
the King roared. “Are you telling me that’s
Silver Court
out there? That His Imperial Majesty’s Silver Court is sitting right outside the walls of Letheburg, together with our blessed Emperor of the Realm?”

“It appears so, Your Majesty.”

“What in Hell or Heaven is going on? How? How did it get here?”

“Well, Majesty, considering that the city streets and other parts of the world have been disappearing everywhere, maybe the land between here and there has simply
 . . . faded away.”