Oath and the Measure (27 page)

“I shall show you a handful of dust,” Ragnell chanted, the stick moving more and more swiftly, “A handful of dust I shall show you.…”

A snowy country, level and treeless, stretched before him, so real that he shivered to look upon it.

Throt. Something told him that these were the steppes of Throt before him. He was looking back into winter, back over months to thick ice and the turn of the year.

Once upon a time
, a voice began ironically, the words insinuating into the cold wind he heard and felt. Startled, Sturm shook his head. He couldn’t tell if this voice was Mara’s doing or rose from the chant of the druidess.

About the time of Yule, in the goblin country
, the voice went on. Now there was a village in the vision, a dozen squat huts half-buried in the snow. Smoke curled from a large central fire, and short, stocky shapes, bent and fur-clad, moved in and out of the shadows.

A squalid place, isolated in the winter desert of Throt. Sturm bristled at the mere sight of it, remembering stories of goblin raids, the hordes as swift and merciless as wolves.

When the Solamnic host rode out of the snow, as swift as a storm over the winter desert, Sturm was exhilarated, breathless. There were twenty Knights, perhaps twenty-five, cloaked and armored, their swords already drawn and thick, dark hides draped across the faces of their shields.

It was the sign of no quarter, the dark shields—when the
evil against them was too great, too unrepentant.

“Why are you showing me this, Ragnell?” he asked. “Are my people going to lose the struggle?”

Wait
, the wind said in his ears.
Wait and attend
.

At the head of the column, a tall horseman raised his hand. Behind him, the Knights spurred their horses to a gallop, and the war cry burst from them in unison.

“Est Mithas oth Sularis!”

Like unstoppable wildfire, they rushed through the goblin encampment. The tall commander brought his sword crashing through the nearest of the snow-covered yurts, and the air exploded with the sound of fracturing wood, of tearing hides, of the shrieks of the surprised inhabitants.

At once the encampment was a shambles. Blades flickered like the wings of swarming bees, and the air was loud with the crash of metal against metal, metal against stone and bone. The goblin spears rattled harmlessly against the shields of the Knights, whose swords struck home with wild efficiency. Horses reared and plunged, and the goblins fell in waves before the onslaught.

Sturm shook his head. His hands were sweaty and clenched, and he knelt on all fours above the vision’s swirling dust, his breath short and his long hair matted and dripping. For a moment, he saw only dirt and planking. He heard only the chanting of Ragnell in the vast silences of the Dun Ringhill lodge.

Then the scene returned, in sharp and brutal detail. A large, rough-looking man—Sturm recognized him as Lord Joseph Uth Matar, head of the vanished family—emerged from a yurt, two goblin younglings in tow. Filthy little creatures, they were, biting and scratching and fouling themselves in their anger and fear.

Without word or expression, Lord Joseph shoved the yammering little creatures to their knees. He spoke with them shortly, softly, laughing at their threats and curses. The audience over, a young Knight—Sturm guessed it was one of the numerous Jeoffreys—wrestled manfully with the
squirming, spitting little monsters. Though his face emerged from the struggle a bit worse for wear after the scoring of their sharp nails, he managed to loop a tight new rope around their wrists and waists.

The huts burned like kindling, like dried grass. Soon the site was ablaze, the black smoke billowing in the subsiding snow. Lord Joseph stood over the goblin younglings, while his lieutenants drew what shabby salvage they could from the tents before setting them to torch.

In the middle of a dozen bonfires, three Knights gathered together over the shrieking little monsters. Lord Joseph squinted, as if he were trying to see beyond the rising smoke. In all directions he turned, now shielding his eyes, as if he were looking for something remote or irretrievably lost.

He nodded, satisfied. Quickly he mounted and muttered something at the two younger Knights, then galloped off at the head of the column. The two waited until the hoofbeats were muffled by snow and distance, until the only sound was the crackle of flame, the screaming and cursing of the young goblins.

Then they drew their swords, and with an elegance born of years in the Barriers, of fencing school and tournament and careful, expensive instruction in the ways of the Measure, they raised the blades on high and brought them down on the little monsters in a graceful, almost beautiful arc.

Sturm lifted his eyes, startled by the imagined screams. Ragnell was staring at him, her face expressionless.

“Well, then,” she said. “I’ve enough of … showing for this day, Sturm Brightblade.”

She rose to her feet, and the dust slowed and settled. Heavily, as though the morning had wearied her, she trudged to the door and knocked. Oron lifted the latch and stood aside as the druidess passed by, never looking back at Sturm.

The young knight sat on the mattress, lost in thought, troubled and unsettled by what he had just seen. Mara began
to sing again somewhere nearby, and her voice was clear and consoling. But Sturm’s thoughts strayed at once from her singing, lost in the Oath and the Measure and the things he had just seen.

Weyland the smith slept in the room off the forge, the fire safely turfed and banked. At this time of year, he was grateful for the warmth, for the cold nights at the edge of spring were uncomfortable for most of the villagers.

By the early hours of the morning, his sleep became restless. He was accustomed to rising at dawn, and over the years, his body had come to anticipate sunrise, stirring and slipping in and out of wakefulness during the last watch of the night.

He thought he heard something astir in the forge—a faint scuttling sound, as though something in the furnace had shifted. He closed his eyes. Not unusual, such sounds, and especially when an uncommon draft of wind found its way down his baffled chimney, stirring the peat with which the fire was covered. Nothing out there worth stealing anyway, he told himself, and drifted back to sleep, in his drowsiness forgetting the Solamnic sword he had reforged two nights ago.

The sword hung by a cord from a nail in the wall. The work the smith had done was nearly perfect. The blade was sharp and strong and resilient, “ready for a hundred battles,” as Weyland had said proudly, holding the weapon up to the afternoon sunlight. And yet from this time forth, it would be two swords: the heirloom of fifty generations of Brightblades, its lineage stretching back to Bedal Brightblade in the shadowy Age of Might; and a new sword, one to which no lineage mattered, born anew and fresh.

This night was the first adventure for the new sword. While Weyland slept, a small hairy tendril reached out and encircled the hilt. Then another and another.

Cyren had barely the strength to carry the weapon. He spun about, staggering backward over the smithy floor, the sword balanced on his back. Suspended between fear and hunger, the sword heavy in his clutches, the spider turned, teetering under the weight, and scrambled for the door to the outside.

Unfortunately, between the dark and the fear and the turning, he rushed for the bedroom door instead. The blade struck the doorframe, and wakened by the sound, Weyland sat upright, bleary-eyed and bleary-headed.

As large an eight-legged vermin as he had ever seen stared at him, wide-eyed, from across the room.

It would be hard to say who was more frightened. Smith and spider screamed together; Weyland leapt through the open window and Cyren clambered about, rattled the sword against the doorframe again, and streaked across the forge and out into the night. Racing around the side of the house, the spider collided with the hysterical smith, and the two of them, screaming louder still, careened off one another and fled into the darkness.

In the center of the village, Sturm awakened to the shriek and the outcry. The guards stirred restlessly outside the door of his cubicle, and someone called out “What’s ’at?” from somewhere near the central fire. A beery, deep voice rumbled “Hush!” and the lodge was suddenly still again.

Sturm lay back and looked up through the opening in the roof of the roundhouse. The sky was bright, the clouds distinct and edged with red, as though Lunitari had passed into splendid fullness.

He had been dreaming something about Knights and swords and goblins in a dark battle, and somewhere distant martial music—not a flute this time, nor a voice, but a trumpet.

On the other side of the cubicle wall, he heard Mara muttering. Sturm smiled wearily.

“Can’t even stop talking when she sleeps,” he whispered. The scene the druidess had shown Sturm puzzled and unsettled
him. The burning houses, the youngling goblins, the hunt in the driving snow …

He lifted his eyes just in time to see a long white thread tumble down from the opening, and above it Sturm saw a hideous, segmented face with ten huge eyes.

Cyren had come for Mara first. It had taken every
bit of his bravery to scale the roof and stand above a large fire, much less to dangle silk into the midst of the village guards. His grotesque, segmented face framed by stars and moonlight, he beckoned frantically, chattering and whirring.

Mara was up the cord like a spider herself. Once, twice, she braced her feet against the concave ceiling, springing and pushing off athletically so that she swung over the lodge like an acrobat. Finally she vanished into the opening in the roof, her brown legs kicking. She peered back into the room and tossed the cord over the other side of the wall to Sturm.

Sturm rocked back on his ankles and took a deep breath.
The escape looked reckless, even foolish, but it was, after all, an escape.

Struggling hand over hand, favoring his shoulder, which had again begun to grieve him, Sturm pulled himself up the webbing until his feet balanced delicately atop the front wall of his cell. Below him, the guardsmen lay sleeping, their backs propped against the outside of his cell. A half-dozen more snored by the banked fire, and at the far entrance, two more slept standing, bowed over their spears.

Sturm smiled, a little more confident, and tied the strand of webbing about his waist. From here, it was only a short leap to the opening in the roof and out to freedom. Bracing himself against the top of the wall, he jumped out, extending his arms …

… and sailed a good three feet short.

He turned in the air, trying a last desperate grasp, and lost what little balance he had left. His feet flew above him and tangled in the webbing. Stifling a cry of panic, Sturm dropped precipitously headfirst toward the glowing, peat-covered center of the fire. The webbing brought him up a few feet short of combustion, and he swung slowly, silently, like a pendulum above the sleeping guardsmen.