Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (39 page)

“My lord!”  Sedrik stopped only long enough to shout to the
sheriff before he ran down the steps toward the horses.  “My lord, it’s the
tanner, Maddock.  He’s at the south gate demanding to speak with you.  He said
I should tell you, my lord, that they watch the gates, they saw the cardinal
leave, and they know what you’re about.  If I may, Sire, he has some of the
farmers with him. If you were to take a moment to see to him…”

The sheriff sat his horse in silence, staring absently
beyond the northern wall.

“I’ll see to him,” seethed Renda, unsheathing her sword,
“and save us the trouble later.”

The other knights laughed grimly, but the sheriff raised his
hand to silence them.  “My apologies to Maddock, but I am…indisposed.”  This,
too, raised a chuckle from the rest of the knights, and the sheriff’s mouth
curved into a wry grin in spite of himself.  “Tell him I shall be pleased to
receive him first thing on the morrow, say, after breakfast.”  He breathed deeply. 
“That should do.”

Sedrik laughed with disbelief.  “I doubt he’ll take it well,
my lord.”

“Oh, your ears will ring the tenday, an he takes it as I
mean him to take it.”  The sheriff smiled darkly and nodded toward the armory. 
“Make haste.”

Sedrik’s brow twitched in understanding.  “Aye, my lord.” 
He bowed and ran back to the castle.

“That should keep Maddock occupied while we leave, and
hopefully, the spectacle he creates will keep his watchers busy, as well.”

Renda mounted her horse, and she and the other three knights
followed her father toward the armory where the smiths had already moved aside
the great anvils piled against the iron door at the rear wall.  Beyond the
door, a grated ramp led deep into the ground, some two hundred feet, and into
the dark tunnels they had not used since the war.

Once the floor began to rise to ground level again, it was
strewn with rich, dry soil, and thick layers of burlap and scrapcloth were
hammered to the stone walls to damp the sound of their horses’ hooves.  Two hundred
yards north of the castle, the tunnel ended in a natural cleft hidden by a
thick forest of brambles that was much easier to see from inside by daylight,
or even moonlight.  Tonight, the way ahead of the knights was merely dark.

The tunnel accounted for some of the legends and mysterious
victories of the Knights of Brannagh all through Syon’s history, for good
reason.  It was a military secret entrusted only to the Knights of Brannagh and
their smiths.  One of Renda’s early victories had come during the stormy and
short-lived flirtation between Kadak and the Anatayan tribes when she led a
battalion of her father’s knights out this tunnel in a surprise attack on the
Anatayan flank.  Her knights closed the third side of a tight triangle with her
father’s soldiers on one side and Wirthing’s on the other that trapped the
tribesmen and forced a quick surrender.

A full battalion.  What luxurious dream was this, to think
that she had ever had more than a handful of knights at her command, or that
Syon had ever had more than these five to defend her.  Yet it had been so, and
not so long ago, in a time of war, before peace came to destroy Brannagh.  She
looked back toward the castle, toward where Maddock and his men prepared to
attack.  “Father,” Renda whispered, “you and I can defeat the cardinal
ourselves.  If we were to leave the others behind to defend the castle—”

He shook his head firmly.  “We must stop the cardinal.”  Her
father kicked his horse into a slow gallop toward the barest brightening of the
shadows ahead that signaled the end of the tunnel.

“But we cannot sacrifice all of Brannagh—”

“Can we not?” he barked, oblivious to the echo of his voice
in the tunnel.  “We are sworn to it, child!”  He set his heel into Revien’s
side, and the horse bolted out the end of the tunnel toward the northwest,
toward the foothills and the dark glade where Pegrine had died.

Renda glanced back through the darkness of the tunnel,
looking toward the keep where her mother watched from the chapel window, where
Nara finished a last gesture of blessing over them at the door, where Sedrik
stalled Maddock below the gatehouse. 

They would be safe, she told herself.  The goddess will keep
them safe.  She had to believe it.  Then she turned and with a wave of her
hand, led the others after her father.

Chul had thrown himself flat into the dry grass and brush
when Maddock had gone by, barely hidden from him and lucky that he was so
intent on his purpose.  But he was not sure where Maddock was going or how long
he might be or—watching the other one, the traveler, return to his army at a
run—whether this was the signal that would start the charge; in any case, he
had to work fast.  The faintest of the stars were already disappearing from the
sky.

The rope was freed, and he’d tied the hook, imprinted with G
for Graymonde—or Gikka—on the end.  Above him and on the other side of the dry
moat was the lowest of the lancet windows on this side, a smallish window some
forty feet high leading into the barracks of the resident knights.  Marigan’s
news of the plague had been most grave, and Chul was not sure any knights would
be left, but just the same, he would rather any that were still alive not try
to kill him on sight.

He was getting ahead of himself.  Before he could try for
the window, he had to cross the dry moat.  He spied the low tree stump at the
side of the castle wall that Gikka had mentioned to him and moved toward it,
gripping the hook.  He would have to swing the hook hard, pay out enough rope
and cast it high to clear the moat.

His first weapon as a small boy had been the sling, and
later, he’d learned the spear.  He’d been quite good for all that his strength
had been that of a child.  His next weapon was to have been the
xindraga
,
what the Invaders called the Dhanani horseflail, a spiked steel ball on the end
of a forty-foot chain with a horned forearm-length handle, used from horseback,
and while he’d not had any real training with it, he’d practiced a bit.  This
hook was not much different.  With Anado’s help, he could do this; he only
hoped Gikka had gauged the length of the rope correctly.

He made ready to throw, but behind him, he heard the quiet
hordes spilling around the castle wall to take up their positions, and he threw
himself to the ground again.  They watched the castle intently, waiting and
watching every stone for something very small, very subtle, placing themselves
carefully.  He looked hopelessly across at the tree stump and up at the window
before he crawled behind some thin brush, hoping he had not missed his only
opportunity.  He stayed where he was and made no sound.  As it was, they would
have him surrounded in a few seconds; best he not give them reason to look for
him.

Then their attention that had been so intent upon the castle
relented sharply, palpably—so much so that he nearly stumbled from his hiding
place into the sudden vacuum.  The army had kept itself hidden and would keep
itself hidden until the attack, but he could feel disorder bristling through
them.  He stood and stared out over the dark plain at four or five shapes,
distant, barely discernible, that glinted and glimmered very faintly through
the rising dust, reflecting back only the torchlight from the castle
battlements.  They seemed to have appeared from nowhere beyond the hidden army,
but they ignored the gathered host—or perhaps were still unaware of them—as
they rode across the meadows toward the cliffs and the foothills.

Chul moved to follow them, even ran a few steps to try to
catch them before they left him behind, but it was hopeless.  They were too far
away and had been even as he had first seen them.  His heart sank.  He had seen
Revien and Alandro only once before, in the stables while he and Gikka were
preparing to leave for Graymonde, but at the front of this small band of
knights, even as far off as they were, even in just the glimmer of torchlight,
they were unmistakable, even in armor.  The sheriff and Lady Renda were
leaving.  He had missed them.

Across the northern meadowlands, they rode in silence, every
fiber of every muscle taut beneath the steel of their armors.  The Brannagh
Horses at Arms flew side by side over the ground in full battle armor, as sure
of hoof over uneven grass clumps, creek ravines and rock mounds as if they ran
a bare plain.

Sworn to it.

After the Liberation, after the Liberator took for himself
and his heirs the title of duke—not king—of Syon, he swore for himself and all
those of his blood an oath of gratitude and fealty to the goddess B’radik. 
When his son, Lexius, who later became the first Sheriff of Brannagh, gathered
together a ragtag mob of exiled Byrandian rebels and made of them the most
deadly order of knights the world had ever known, he likewise swore them to the
service and protection of B’radik, the duke and all Syon.  But to B’radik first
and foremost.

Memories flew through Renda’s mind as she rode, memories of
Pegrine standing serene and strong before the duke, of the strange glow that
surrounded her in the crypt.

…my body was killed and my spirit was trapped with no place to
go when She found me.  It was smashing good luck for us both, you see.

She remembered Nara lying unconscious on the palace floor,
her habit dim to almost gray, the priests’ feeble attempts to save her.  What
was it Arnard had told her, that they’d been gaining ground against the
plague?  How could they if B’radik was bound, unless…

She told me She could fix my body for a little while so I could
be Her helper here.  But only for a while since it drains Her so.

Arnard had seen a child at the temple’s destruction—not
partaking of the destruction, but defending as she could against it.  Of
Roquandor and the rest of Brannagh’s dead rising to Pegrine’s protection.  To
B’radik’s protection.

We are sworn to it.

At last she understood.  Pegrine was not raised by B’radik
to be her messenger or her companion undead; she was the goddess’s avatar, Her
conduit of power into this plane that somehow weakened Her binding.  If Pegrine
fell, B’radik would fall.

Suddenly, all around them, hundreds of armed men and women
sprang from the hillocks and trees and, instead of rushing for the castle
behind them, they ran for the knights shouting and screaming, waving their
swords—where did so many get swords?—and from the surrounding meadows and
hillsides, even more of them flowed in to enclose the horses.

Hundreds.

She rode straight on and drew her long sword.

“Do not stop for them,” her father shouted and spurred his
horse on.  “The glade, Renda!  We must reach the glade!”

Revien and Alandro did not slow at all, and the other three
horses fell in close behind them.  While the jeering, shouting army clotted
close around them, they raced for the cliff, driving most of their attackers
out of the way as they rode.  But the horses were not fast enough in their
armor, and the way just ahead of them was closing fast.

Chul’s only chance now was to get back to his own horse and
hope he could catch them with his warning.  He had no idea where they could be
going with this army massing outside their gates, but he had to reach them, had
to warn them.  He turned to run for the hillside, and instantly collided with
what must have been a tree.  In a second, he found himself crushed to the
ground beneath a man’s weight and silently cursed his own stupidity.

The man who had run into him got up and squinted down at the
bare ground where Chul lay gasping for breath, toed it tentatively.  He could
feel something was there, and now he could hear it, but he could not see it. 
He flipped back his dark cape and drew his sword to probe the ground.

Cape.  Sword.  And beneath the cape, simple farmers’
clothes.  He had spent enough time with Invaders, studying them, becoming them,
to know that this was strange. First Hadrian priests chanting in Dhanani, now
farmers in knights’ capes carrying swords.  Nothing made sense.

The point of the man’s sword came perilously close to Chul’s
knee.  The boy rolled his leg slowly out of the sword’s way as Gikka had taught
him.  Slowly, so slowly, but not slowly enough.

The man’s gaze narrowed a moment, and then his eyes got
wide.  “By the gods,” he murmured.  He reached down through a cloud of the
boy’s breath and picked Chul up by the throat.

Chul gasped in amazement and tried to pry the man’s fingers
away from his windpipe.  He tried to hurl himself at the man and grapple him
down, but he was off balance, and the man was strong.  Chul could not seem to
get his feet under him.

The man dragged him the few feet into the torchlight and
threw back his hood.  No, the disappointment in the man’s eyes said, this was
not the one he was hoping to see.  He opened his mouth.  He drew breath to
shout to the others.

Chul’s knife ripped through his throat.

The effect on the surrounding army was almost
instantaneous.  By the time the dying man crumpled to the stones outside the
gate, by the time Chul had freed himself from his grasp, and run off along the
castle wall, those who had heard the shout had turned to look, and confusion
and fear rippled through the army.

Never mind that Maddock had sworn the Brannagh assassin was
dead, killed at his own hand.  If it wasn’t her, it was her ghost, and the
fearful whispers of “Gikka!” that blazed through the ranks broke what was left
of the villagers’ discipline and scattered them to chase their own shadows into
the hills.

But then most of the army was not made up of villagers, and
within seconds, several of those who were left split off to pursue the boy.

The main body of the force was too well trained to
completely break off its pursuit of the knights; it did not splinter apart in
panic.  But in the moment of confusion, in the hair’s breadth of indecision,
the attacking army split its attention between the commotion at their flank and
the Knights of Brannagh, and it was enough.