Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (8 page)

“How dare you profane My altar with the blood of Mine
enemy!” the voice shrieked.

The whirls of black circled the bishop’s body faster and
faster, and he was buffeted back and forth as he tried to rise. Cilder managed
to get himself to his knees before the blood began burbling over his lips.

“No!” he wheezed, staring in horror first at the knight,
then at her squire. She saw the realization in his eyes.  “Enemy…the verinara. 
The child, oh mercy!  Tell me it is not true!  Tell me they did not take…!”  He
threw himself upon the ground, clawing at Renda’s boots, grasping at her tunic
and begging for mercy in his wretchedness. “What have I done?  I have
sacrificed a child of Damerien!  The prophecy!  What have I done?”

Prophecy again.  First Nara, now Cilder.  Renda looked at
Gikka.  What prophecy?  But the squire only shook her head in bafflement.

Then, at each joint of bone to bone, Cilder’s body began to
unravel itself with dull sickening pops that counterpointed the angry slamming
of the bolt against Gikka’s dagger.  Aghast, wooden sword in hand, Renda
watched the madness grow in his eyes as he watched his body be devoured by
sulfurous flame, slowly, inevitably, bit by bit.  The bishop shrieked with
terror and pain, breaking his voice and bringing his servants to come pounding
at the sealed door.

With infinite cruelty, the god had somehow kept him alive
during this last of his dissolution, when his body was reduced to no more than
a wretched trunk and head, and now she could see his eyes bulging and his
tongue swelling within his mouth, yet somehow, cruelly, he was still conscious.
 The horrible mouth continued to scream until the tongue choked off the sound
and the bishop lay flopping absurdly and gasping on the floor.

“For Pegrine and B’radik!” Renda leaped forward and plunged
the wooden sword into his heart with all her strength and pulled it free.  What
remained of the bishop, a bloodied piece of his cassock over his absurd,
limbless trunk, quivered weakly for a moment before it relaxed at Renda’s feet,
silent and still.

In the sudden silence of the room, Renda stared at the dead bishop’s
body, numb, cold.  Then she knelt to offer a prayer to B’radik for the soul of
the man she had known all her life, her father’s gentle priest who had come so
far from B’radik’s light.  But then she stood and raised Pegrine’s bloody
wooden sword above the body of the evil creature who had murdered her niece. 
“Praise to Rjeinar, vengeance is done,” she muttered, and dropped the verinara
leaf on his body.  Then she stripped off a piece of the bishop’s cassock to
wrap around the gory sword.

Behind them the servants and some priests from the temple
stood at the door where it had suddenly come open, staring in shock and horror
at the scene before them.  The beautiful white walls of the bishop’s chamber
ran black with burned and spattered blood, the largest part of Cilder’s body
lying just beneath the table with its grisly bowls.  The smell of burned flesh
and blood tang filled the room.  The knight and squire faced the pale and
menacing faces of the household, wondering whether anyone would leave the manse
alive.

“It is over,” spoke a quiet voice from behind the crowd. 
“Get back to your duties.”

Renda’s hand went to her sword. 

The servants nodded quickly, not looking at each other nor
seeking the source of the voice but dispersing immediately to their work,
leaving only a single priest standing in the doorway.  He wore the robes of a
high priest of B’radik, and the faint glow about his form was unmistakable,
pure and white.  He had a gentle face and looked to be about the sheriff’s age
with bands of steel gray and white through his hair.  Renda supposed that,
having spent so many years in B’radik’s service, he could call upon
considerable power, if anyone still could.

“I greet you in the name of B’radik and sow your hearts with
truth and light,” he said, bowing quickly. “I am called Arnard.” He looked up
the hallway for a moment, then gestured for the women to follow him out.  Once
they stood outside the bishop’s chambers, he waved his hand quickly over the
doorway, and a white wall closed over it before he led them down the hallway. 
“I trust you have horses waiting?”

Renda nodded, looking back to see bewilderment in Gikka’s
eyes.  “Yes, of course, but why—”

He led them toward the servants’ stairway.  “We have no
time.  Know this, Lady Renda, in case you had any doubt.  You and your
household are in danger.”

Renda drew breath to speak, but he hushed her with a wave.

“Hear me.  The temple is split, and we who serve B’radik
lose more to …their god every day.  B’radik has grown weak, so weak that She
answers only my simplest prayers; that She sealed yon door for me is a most
welcome sign.  But the rest count themselves lucky to heal their own sprains
and bruises by daylight.  By evenfall, most of the priests find themselves
utterly impotent.  They watch with jealous and frustrated eyes while those who
have gone to the other have unlimited power. And so, one by one, our priests
are seduced away.  Now that the bishop is defeated...”

“What other?” asked Gikka.

But Arnard shook his head, and she could see his frustration
in the gesture.  “They never use a name.”  He stood at the top of the stairs
and motioned for them to climb down.  “But I have seen their works.  They would
destroy everything you hold dear.”

Renda frowned.  “But the bishop killed the sheriff’s granddaughter,
and his god killed him for it.  Surely they will return now that justice—”

“No,” said the priest worriedly, looking back toward the
bishop’s sealed chamber. “Their god,” he said heavily, “smote the bishop for
his clumsiness, for drawing the attention of B’radik’s guardian houses
prematurely.  For warning you, as it were.”  Arnard’s gaze dropped reluctantly
to the bloody bundle she carried, Pegrine’s toy sword.  “And do not forget, 
you saved Cilder from that death, Lady.  After a fashion.”

Renda shut her eyes for a moment, then nodded.  “I see.”

“Peace,” breathed Gikka, “I hear steps.”

The priest hurried them down the stairs.  “Protect
yourselves well,” he told them from the top of the stairway.  “I will speak
with you again soon.”

*          *          *

The old chapel occupied only one rounded tower in the oldest
and best protected part of the castle, on the north side where the windows were
no more than slits between the thick stones.  The household rarely used this
chapel now, although occasionally a visiting knight might find his way here to
be alone or to make his own peace with B’radik.  The mortar in the walls was
crumbling in places, and the frescoes depicting B’radik’s victory in the Gods’
Rebellion had faded into the plaster, leaving only the gold of the Dragon’s
eyes still visible on the north wall.

Centuries of voices raised in song and prayer, the wept
prayers of Brannagh women for B’radik to protect their men in battle, the blind
joy of the newly married, the pain and sorrow of those who, like themselves,
had come to bury a child—all these were here at once, seeping back from the
stones that had so greedily drunk them up for so long, swirling and eddying
over the pews and floors.  As Renda approached the pew where her family and
Gikka sat before the little veiled bier, she moved through these currents of
pain and guilt, not sure how much of what she felt was her own.  More than
enough, well more than enough.

Beneath the veil, amid tiny fragrant bouquets of rosebuds,
sprays of brilliant doucetels and snowberries all in white, Renda saw the
little girl’s body looking more peaceful than she could have hoped, and beneath
the tearing pain in her heart, she was grateful to the maids for their
efforts.  Somehow, they had bound Pegrine’s trunk to give her body a more
lifelike form beneath the white lace of her gown.  Her arms and legs had been
put straight, with her hands crossed peacefully over her chest to hide their
missing fingertips.  Even her face had been smoothed out of its agony, and with
the soft glow of a blush on her cheeks, Renda could almost believe that the
child lay asleep.  The illusion was not perfect, but it was enough.

The family stayed a while in the chapel, offering their own
poor prayers for Pegrine’s soul to speed its way through the stars and leave
this place, a Brannagh daughter, a fitting gift from B’radik to Verilion, but
they all knew the truth.  B’radik had no bishop at the temple now; just as no
one stood before them to direct their prayers, so no one stood to consecrate
the child’s grave.  Especially given the manner of her death, she could not be
sealed within her niche, nor even her bier set directly upon any stone of the
vault, until a proper bishop could come, and none was within a tenday’s ride of
the castle.  Until then, she would lie on her funeral bier within the vault
over a thick black cloth to keep her unsanctified flesh from desecrating the
whole of the crypt.  Pegrine would go to an unhallowed grave, unprotected and
alone against its dangers, until a new bishop could come to Brannagh.

When at last the family followed the little girl’s body into
the vault, Renda and Gikka carried the bier.  Lady Glynnis chose the child’s
temporary resting place herself and set the black cloth over the sarcophagus of
Lexius, the first Sheriff of Brannagh, in the hopes that his formidable spirit
might protect little Pegrine. Then they settled the funeral bed atop it.

So dark, the crypt, thought Renda.  So bleak and chill.  But
Pegrine had never been afraid of the dark, not the way Renda had as a child;
Renda supposed she would not mind it so much.  What nonsense, to think that she
still inhabited the flesh they set here to rest.  She was surely gone, sped
through the stars upon their prayers and wrapped in Verilion’s own cloak
against the cold.  Pegrine, at least, was at peace. 

Even so, the mausoleum seemed overflowing with sorrow, as if
the many dead sheriffs and their kin mourned with the family at Pegrine’s
death. 

Renda prayed over Pegrine’s bier for a time before she
lifted the veil and placed the bloodied wooden sword into the little girl’s
hands.  For a moment, only a moment, she fancied that the child’s hands opened
to receive her gift, grateful that her Auntie Renda could do her this last
service.  But when Renda looked again, the sword lay flat beneath Pegrine’s
mutilated hands, sinking sickeningly against the bandages that filled out her
body and bloodying the gown that the maids had worked so hard to keep white.

At last, tears spilled over Renda’s gown of mourning, not
the tears of honest grief but of futility.  Her revenge had meant nothing,
changed nothing.  Pegrine was still dead.

S
he
missed the sting of sweat and blood in her eyes that cut streaks through the
grime on her face.  She could feel it now, when she closed her eyes, that and
the close, sweaty heat of her armor that seemed to weigh nothing when she
fought.  In her dream, she saw herself look down at the unmarred peplum on her
armor and she smiled.  The battle was yet to come.  She had not missed it.

She did not flinch as a great arc of magical power lashed out
over the demons against the stone and mortar of the ancient keep.  The wall
punched inward abruptly, crushing the demons massed behind it and scattering
those outside into terrified chaos.

At last, she saw what she had waited her entire life to see:
ahead lay the glowing, fiery breach, their way into Kadak’s stronghold. 
Triumphant, she braced her foot against the creature’s chest and wrenched her
sword free.

But Pegrine wasn’t there.

Of course not, she told herself in the logic of dreams.  She
was only five at the time.  But there was another reason why Pegrine wasn’t
there.  Wasn’t there?  Something terrible.  Something cold, dark, badly out of…

“No,” she murmured in her sleep, fighting away the present. 
“Please, let me just… remember…”

“Bloody Hadrians.  Whole turncoat army of ‘em.”  Gikka threw
aside the stick she’d used to sketch her map in the dust and settled back on
her haunches in disgust.  Her face glowed gritty orange in the torch-light,
painted as it was in sandy sludge, and her dark hair was slicked back with mud
and sweat.  “Sets me to wonder who minds our east flank.”

Renda watched her knights and soldiers streaming in through the
broken wall behind her, bloody, dirty, exhausted.  Awestricken. Proud.

She had kept her promise to them: they were inside Kadak’s
fortress, and after half a millennium of fighting, Syon would win at last or
die fighting.  These few and her father’s forces along with the last remnants
of Tremondy, Windale and Wirthing who protected their south flank were the last
of the Resistance.  These and the Hadrians to the east had pooled their
strength for one final push to defeat Kadak. But if the Hadrians had joined
Kadak…

“It does not matter,” she told them. “Tonight, the Five Hundred
Years’ War ends one way or another.”

The men cheered, and she smiled over them.  They only knew that
they had put Renda of Brannagh within striking distance of Kadak.  They could
end the war.  What they could not know, what they could never know, was how
precarious their position actually was.

Renda crouched beside her squire and lowered her voice. 
“Whatever happens, Gikka, you must get Duke Brada away from this place.  If
Kadak destroys him, our victory means nothing.  To say nothing of what will
happen without him if we fall.”  She looked between Gikka and Dith, the one
called the Merciless, who sat cross-legged beside her, apparently lost in his
own thoughts.  “You can still reach him?”

“Getting to him’s not the problem,” answered Gikka, “it’s
getting him out alive.  I seen him, Renda.”  She lowered her voice.  “He’ll not
see the dawn—”

“But he yet lives.  Can you get him out?”

“That I don’t know!”  She scowled and scraped the unusually
long nails of her little fingers against the stone wall behind her.  “With him
like he is, I need a clear run, or we’re caught, sure.”  She laughed, and the
sound struck Renda with its bitterness.  “I need rid of them traitor Hadrians
is what I need, and then it’s a near thing.”

Renda looked over her exhausted forces.  Her losses would be
devastating if she sent them against the Hadrians.

“I’ll see to the Hadrians,” murmured Dith.

“You yourself?”  Gikka looked up at him.  “Sure I don’t see
how.  The whole place is acrawl.”

But something—was it amusement?—flashed in his blue eyes.  He
had a plan. Dith was unconventional, young and brash, but he had never failed
her before.  After all, he had been the one to breach the wall.  Whatever he
had in mind might be their only chance to save the duke.

“You’ll know when.”  He squeezed Gikka’s shoulder
affectionately.  Then he stood and picked up his rucksack, shaking smooth his
seamless gold robes.  “Just be ready.”

Just be ready…By the gods, they were ready, weren’t they? 
They would win.  They had won.  They were winning.  Weren’t they?  Hadn’t
they?  But something told her she had missed something.

Her sleeping mind tried to make sense of it but could not. 
This would be her moment of glory.  She had seen how it would end somehow,
perhaps in a dream.  Perhaps they had already won.  Perhaps they were home, and
Pegrine was…

Pegrine was…

No.  They were winning the war, and Peg was safe at
Brannagh.  Safe.  Nothing could hurt her.  Nothing.

She turned over in her bed, pulling the furs up around her.

“By B’radik…” Renda muttered under her breath, looking around
her.

Blood slicked the throne room floor; blood from Kadak’s
soldiers, blood from their own.  The two knights moved as well as they could
through the settling smoke and dust, dodging head down between the heaps of
shattered rock and broken bodies while a hail of molten stone pelted their
armors.  Renda crouched beside Lord Daerwin.  No one else stirred in the
rubble.  They were alone, now.  Alone against—

“Not I, threatened by army, by sword, Brannagh!”  The hideous
creature called Kadak writhed around his throne, a huge, lumpy mound of what
looked like potter’s clay left too long on the wheel.  His strange split
mandible struggled to form the words in their language.  “My end come of them;
I foreseen it.  Vengeful, vengeful; never forget, them.”

“Them?”  Renda whispered, but her father shook his head.

“Mages, perhaps?” he whispered.

“Bah, Brannagh.”  The creature laughed thunderously.  “I no
fear mages, mages all dead!  I kill them all.   I fear only them!  They have
the power to unmake.  They will be Kadak’s end.  But they not here.” He flexed
his claws, and a pillar behind them exploded. 

They dove behind another heap of rubble and covered their heads
until the marble shrapnel settled.  Then Daerwin edged himself out while Renda scrambled
forward and put her back to one of the few standing pillars in the chamber. 
The great beast turned toward her, raising his claw.

“Kadak,” the sheriff shouted, and the monster’s great head
jerked to face him.  “Your forces are defeated, your allies have fled.” 

Renda crouched low behind her pillar.  She had heard a silence
fall over the Hadrian army and then a low rumble, and all at once, they had run
shrieking from the fortress, trampling each other, breaking open the very walls
to escape.  Somehow, Dith had done his part, and Gikka would do hers.  Duke
Brada would soon be away, safe.

Through the corner of her eye, she watched the creature slither
lower on his stone and felt a chill on her spine.  Cold, dark.  Something badly
out of place.  She flexed her hand around her sword and silenced her fear.

“You are finished.”  The sheriff inched closer.  “Surrender.”

The pillar at Renda’s back blasted apart, but she had already
moved to the wall, sword ready.  She saw an opening and was already in motion
before her mind was quite sure what she saw.  Two great steps, and she leaped
the throne at Kadak’s back, plunged one sword between the armored spines of his
neck and ripped across his throat with the other.

A wicked laugh erupted near Lord Daerwin, and the knight jumped
back.  A demon guard exploded from the rubble with its eyes glowing yellow, and
it raised its poison-spiked ha’guaka ax over the sheriff’s head.  Its huge
mouth grinned wide above its destroyed throat.  “You not win this way,
Brannagh.”

“Neither will you.”  Daerwin buried his sword deep in
Kadak-the-demon’s gut.

The yellow glow dissipated from the dead eyes, and the body
crumpled into silence, but not before a new laugh echoed near the doorway.

“Renda!”  Lord Daerwin worked to free his sword from the
demon’s body.

She looked up to see one of their own soldiers, a farmboy in
the ragtag remains of his armor, rising unsteadily.  Blood seeped from a fatal
gash in the farmer’s head, but his eyes gleamed a horrible, unnatural yellow. 

She felt a surge of outrage that Kadak would so defile the
dead, but she set it aside.  The boy’s spirit was in the stars.  Kadak could do
him no harm now. She had no time for outrage.

Kadak-the-boy hurled handfuls of burning sand as he moved
toward Daerwin.  “Who surrender now, Daerwin of Brannagh?”

The sheriff pulled desperately at his sword, but it was stuck
fast in the dead demon’s torso.  Weaponless, he backed away toward another pile
of stone.

Renda threw her second sword to her father as she passed and
circled toward Kadak-the-boy. The creature was flanked.  “Yield, Usurper! You
have nothing left.”

“Wrong, girl-knight.  I have Damerien.”  He laughed when Renda
sprang from one broken wall to another to dodge a spire of white flame he
raised from the floor, and he swept his fingers through the air to raise a
barrage of flying stone and grit.  “You come for him,” he mewled, slinking
closer. “You think maybe with him, you win? Damerien the Father, Damerien the
Son.” Kadak-the-boy snickered.  “But he not here, neither.”

Behind him, Renda saw a shadow pass across the smashed doorway
and vanish in the darkness.  A moment later, Kadak-the-boy jerked sharply and
fell, the yellow glow leaking from his eyes.

The beast at the throne raised its head, and Renda could see
that her cut across his throat was all but healed.  He suddenly rose to his
full, terrifying height and stretched his forelegs wide.  Every wall exploded
in white hot light.

Renda dropped to the ground beside her father and gasped.  In
full view, where the boy had been standing, knelt Gikka, flicking blood and
something else from her stiletto, something that sizzled on the hot floor near
the wall.  And beside her, Brada, Duke of Damerien, leaned against the doorjamb
wrapped in nothing but a muddy, threadbare cloak—Gikka’s cloak.  Under his
black, blood-matted hair, his deep brown eyes shone almost gold with fever, and
dark blood seeped from his parched mouth, but he bared his teeth and raised a
shaking hand toward the creature.

Instantly, the heat was gone.  The fire, the smoke, gone.  Only
light remained.

“Damerien.”  Kadak’s voice betrayed surprise and a bit of
fear.  He recoiled in the cool brightness, his eye fixed on Gikka who crept
between the piles gouging out the eyes of the dead, closing his doors.  “You not
destroy me, neither.”  He laughed haughtily.  “Only them.”

Brada stumbled forward weakly. “All of them,” he gasped, “or
just one?”

“Here, none!”  The monster spat an angry shower of fire over
them.  “I see none!”

“Ah, prophecy.”  Brada waved Kadak’s attack aside and smiled
faintly.  “Such a delicate thing.” 

Renda met his gaze as she stalked closer and closer to the
beast.  Through the corner of her eye, she saw a new shadow cross the doorway,
but she could not stop to look.  Her two-handed grip shifted around her sword
hilt.  She saw the creature look toward the doorway, felt his terror rise…and
she struck.

She breathed in, awake and dully aware that she was standing
in her sweat-saturated nightshirt, sword drawn, scabbard thrown aside on the
floor.  Stone floor chilled her bare feet, and embers from the fireplace cast a
glow over stone walls that glinted off her blade.  On the wall, a tapestry.

She stared into the tapestry, lost, watching her world
solidify around her.  It was the tapestry her mother had made of the Battle of
Durlindale, where her grandfather Vilmar had died.

Castle Brannagh.

She was in her bed chamber at home, but why?  What had
happened to her?

Time rushed over her, as it did every time she awakened, and
she felt the familiar dull despair crush her heart.  The war was over, and two
years had passed, two years lost to emptiness.

No, not just emptiness.  Not this time.  Never again just
emptiness.

Pegrine was dead.

She choked out an angry, bitter sob.

Renda’s father had told her that she was haunted by dreams
of the violence and horror she’d seen in the war—atrocity and carnage her young
mind had not been adequately prepared to handle.  But he was wrong.  By the
gods, the battlefield was where she’d known her place and known almost by instinct
what had to be done.  The battlefield mattered.  On the battlefield, she could
win.

Her dreams were the only place where she felt alive anymore,
and they were haunted by the mindless futility and horror of this new world at
peace, this world they had worked so hard to achieve, where little girls could
be butchered by corrupted priests.

She did not scream anymore.  She did not give in to the
tears of rage, not since Pegrine’s death.  She just settled back into her bed
and buried herself under the furs, hoping to dream again and this time,
perhaps, never to wake at all.