The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (8 page)

The goodwife curtsied her thanks. “It’s hard to look at,” she said. “We got away, but others didn’t. And with the—wreck—gone, mayhap other folk’ll settle back.”

“Do you have a man, Goodwife Gilson?” the captain asked. He was sitting on her firewood porch, drinking his own wine. He’d brought her
some. She had twelve children, the oldest daughter old enough and more to be wed, and the youngest son barely out of diapers.

“He’s hunting,” she said. Only her eyes betrayed her worry. “He’ll be back. Winter was hard.” She eyed the six gold ducats—two years’ income. “I reckon you saved us.”

The captain waved off her thanks, and after hearing everything she knew about traffic on the road and creatures in the woods, he went back to his own pavilion. The quarter guard was forming, and there were six great bonfires burning, fed from the remnants of twenty houses and twenty firewood piles.

His brother was sharing his pavilion, and he was standing in front of it in conversation with Ser Danved, who was in full harness, leading the night watch. The captain came up and nodded, intent on his bed.

Gavin pointed out over the swamp. “This position is nigh impregnable from the north and east,” he said. Out in the swamp, faeries flitted and smaller night insects pulsed with colour. The swamp spread almost a mile north and south, which was why no one had driven a new road around it.

The sky in the west was still coloured rose, and silhouetted the stockade of the small fort behind them—currently sheltering the baggage and part of the quarter guard, on alert.

Gabriel looked around in the dusk light, as if seeing it for the first time.

Ser Danved, who always had a comment for every situation, laughed. “It’s fine if you don’t mind having both of your flanks in the air,” he said. Indeed, at their feet, a small stream—the captain had stepped over it on his way to his tent—ran down from the higher ridge into the swamp, and provided the only cover for the ridge’s northward face on its burbling way to the Albin, miles to the east. “Jesus saviour, this must be the only place in the world with a swamp halfway up a mountain.”

Bored and tired, the captain shrugged. “If I ever have to fight Morea, I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. He passed into his tent, and caught Danved and Gavin exchanging a look of amusement.

He ignored them, intent on bed.

They had two alarms in the night. Both found the captain fully armoured and ready, but there were no attacks and no engagements.

In the morning, the captain found a splay-footed track just south of the horse lines, and a heavy war arrow. He brought it to Cully, who eyed it and nodded.

“Canny said he hit something. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, it seems.” Canny was a barracks lawyer and a liar and scarcely the best archer, but the bloody fletches told their own story.

The captain tossed the arrow in the air and snapped his fingers. The arrow paused—and hung there. The captain passed his hand over the length of the broken arrow and the head flared green.

Slowly, as if a vat filling with water, something began to form in glittering green and gold, starting from the ground. Soldiers began to gather in the dawn, and there was muttering. The captain seldom used his hermetics in public.

Mag came and watched him work.

He was in deep concentration, so she

found him in his palace. As they had once been bonded—however briefly—she could enter his palace at will. He smiled to see her.

“A pretty working,” Mag said.

“Gelfred’s,” he said. “A sort of forensic spell. All the huntsmen have variants of it.”

She watched him as he manipulated his
ops
in four dimensions and cast, his use of power sparing and efficient.

The thing continued to fill with light.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said.

It had an elongated head and far too many teeth. The head seemed to speak more of fish than of animal—streamlined and armoured. The neck was draconian—long and flexible. The body seemed armoured in heavy shell, at odds with the elegant neck.

It crouched, ready to attack, back bent at an unnatural angle, at least to a man, with back-hinged arms and legs.

They both emerged from their palaces together to look at what he had wrought.

“What is that thing?” Ser Gavin asked. “I thought I’d seen—everything.”

Ser Gabriel shrugged. “I suspect that the Wild is much bigger than our notions of
everything
,” he said. “What is it? It’s the thing that came for our horses last night. Good shooting, Canny. Next time, kill it.”

He clapped his hands and the sparkling monster vanished and the arrow fell into his hands. He handed it to Wilful Murder. “Put that head on a shaft,” he said. “And keep it to hand.”

“An’ I know why,” Wilful said. He was pleased to have been picked—it showed.

The captain got on his riding horse, the last fires were put out, and the column began to ride. Wilful was one of the last men at the fires, and then he used the goodwife’s breakfast fire to get his resin soft. He didn’t leave the clearing until the sheep herd was moving, and he waved to Tom as he cantered past, leaving a mother and twelve scared-looking children alone with the Wild.

He handed the completed arrow to the captain, and Ser Gabriel took it, said a few terse words in Archaic, and handed it back to Wilful, who put it head up through his belt.

Six miles on, where the old West Road—really just a trail, and scarcely that—branched towards the tiny settlement at Wilmurt and the Great
Rock Lake before plunging north into the High Adnacrags and eventually reaching Ticondaga, the scouts found a man, or the ruins of one. He’d been skinned and put on the trail, a stake through his rectum and emerging from his mouth. His arms and legs were gone.

Count Zac frowned. “I’ll have the poor bastard cut down and buried,” he said.

The captain shook his head. “Not until after the column rides past,” he said. “I want them all to see.”

Ser Michael caught his eye. “The hunter?” he asked quietly.

Ser Gabriel sighed. “Hell. I didn’t even think. Oh, the poor woman.”

Ser Michael nodded.

“I’ll go,” Father Arnaud said. He snapped his fingers and Lord Wimarc, who had joined them with word of the council at the Inn of Dorling, brought him his great helm.

The captain thought a moment. “Yes. Take Wilful. Get the body down and decently shrouded. Father, offer to take the family with you. Best take a wagon. Drat. This will cost me the day.”

“It might save your soul,” Father Arnaud said.

Their gazes crossed.

“I have to consider the greater good of the greater number,” the captain said calmly.

“Really?” asked Father Arnaud. “Am I addressing the Red Knight or the Duke of Thrake?”

The two men sat on their horses, eyes locked.

“Michael, can you think of a way I can tell the good father that he’s right and still appear all powerful?” He laughed. “Very well, Father. I am suitably chastened. War horse and helmet. Ser Michael, you have the command. If my memory serves there’s a wagon circle about half a league on, just after crossing good water. Give me one of the empty wagons and I’ll take Zac and half his lads.”

“And me,” Ser Gavin said.

The captain smiled impishly. “Knights errant,” he said. “Mercy mild. Father Arnaud, Gavin, our lances, and Zac.” He put a hand up. “No more!”

Other knights volunteered, and Sauce thought they were a pack of tomfools. So did Bad Tom when he came up.

The “empty” wagons proved to be full to bursting with the loot of southern Thrake, and some very red-faced archers—and men-at-arms—watched their belongings unloaded onto the wet stone road.

The captain was scathing. “A fine thing if they were to hit us right now,” he said. “Ripped to pieces because we had too much loot. Get it put away, gentlemen. Or dump it in the ditch.” He saluted Ser Michael.

Ser Michael did not sound like the nice young man they all knew. He sounded like the son of a great noble.

“Well, gentlemen?” they heard him say. “Time’s passing. I’ll just say a
prayer for the captain’s success. And when I’m done, I’ll ask Mag to set fire to anything left on the road. Understand?”

Mag smiled.

Sauce laughed. Ten minutes later, moving again, she looked up at the wise woman. “Would you have burned it?” she asked.

Mag laughed. “With pleasure,” she said.

Sauce swore. “He sounds like the captain,” she said, waving at Ser Michael.

Mag laughed again. “He went to all the best schools,” she said.

The captain took his command lances; Atcourt, Foliak, de Beause and Laternum, as well as the new Occitan knights, Danved Lanval and Bertran Stofal. With Father Arnaud’s lance and Ser Gavin’s and his own, he had a powerful force, and the spring sun glittered on their red and gold as they rode back down the road towards the Hole. Count Zac rode ahead, the red foxtail of his personal standard shining in the sun, and half a dozen of his steppe riders spread through the trees on either side.

The company archers rode on either side of the wagon. They were all veterans, and Cully, the captain’s archer, was the company master archer. He rode a fine steppe horse and his eyes were everywhere. All of the archers had their bows strung and in their hands. Ricard Lantorn, despite being mounted, had an arrow on the string of his war bow.

The pages brought up the rear. In the captain’s household, even the pages had bows and light armour, and they, too, were strung and ready. The captain’s caution had communicated itself fully.

The spring day was pleasant. The sun was high, and the world and the woods seemed at peace. Robins sang in the high branches of the beech wood through which the Royal Road ran. A woodpecker began his endless hammering, searching for early bugs on a tall dead tree. A few early insects droned along the column. The weather was cool enough to make an arming coat and a few pounds of mail and plate seem comfortable. At the clearing, they could see the loom of the Adnacrags in the north—low hills, dark with trees, in the foreground, and farther, the sharper shapes of the high peaks—snow capped, streaked in the dark lines of distant streams.

The captain rode with his senses stretched.

His brother glanced over at him.

“Asleep?” he asked with a smile.

Gabriel shrugged. “Something is troubling me.”

“Beyond that we are riding into an ambush?” Ser Gavin asked.

“That thing—whatever the hell it was,” Gabriel said. “I wish I’d had a corpse. But it’s not
from here.
” He struggled for words. “And when I think about the things Master Smythe said—I wonder what that means.”

Gavin gave him a look that suggested that his brother thought that watching the woods for ambush might be more productive.

“I need to—never mind. I’m not going to be very communicative for
a few minutes.” Gabriel shrugged his shoulders, moving the weight of his harness off his hips for a moment.

“Should we change horses?” Gavin asked.

Gabriel looked around. “Not yet. I want my charger fresh.”

All around him were excellent knights who had killed very powerful things. He

turned inside himself and went into his palace. Everything was there, and he bowed to Prudentia, who smiled.

“Watch for me, Pru,” he said. “I need to go in there.”

She turned her ivory head and glanced at the door. “On your head be it,” she said. “It should be safe enough.”

Very cautiously, like a man approaching a sleeping tiger, Gabriel walked over to the red door. With a deep breath that had no real meaning in the
aethereal
, he put his hand on the knob and pushed it open.

Instantly he was in Harmodius’s memory palace. But nothing was crisp and clear except the golden door at his back and Harmodius’s mirror, a device he’d used. It was an internal artefact that allowed the user to “see” any
potentia
—any workings—cast directly on his person. Harmodius had spent too long imprisoned in another’s false reality to allow himself to ever be fooled in such a way again. Gabriel was briefly surprised that the old man hadn’t taken the artefact with him, but he smiled at the thought—of course, it was a memory artefact.

Harmodius’s abandoned memory palace stretched away from the centre checkerboard and the free standing mirror to a distant and dusty obscurity, like a summer house infrequently used. Gabriel moved cautiously across the parquetry floor and then—very carefully—began to examine some of the old man’s memories.

It was very dark, and he could only see things dimly. He was rarely frightened in his memory palace; casting in combat would have been too difficult otherwise, and the lack of time inside the palace usually gave a caster time to be calm and thorough, but here, in this unlit shadow realm of another man’s mind, Gabriel was scared almost to panic. He had no idea what rules guided his passage through Harmodius’s mind or memories. He only knew that as the man had occupied his head for almost a year, the red door must lead here. Harmodius had entered his own memory palace often enough, but this was only the third or fourth time that Gabriel had gone the other way, and the first time since it was—unoccupied.

And of course, with the guiding light of the other essence gone, it was dark.

“Summoning,” Gabriel said aloud.

It grew lighter. And he watched a memory flit across the floor in wisps, like a marred projection or a magic lantern slide with honey on it. It was an interesting memory; Harmodius was sitting with Queen Desiderata in a room and casting. She provided the
ops
.

Gabriel watched the summoning. Because it had involved the casting of a
form, the memory was very clear, and he could follow the shadows of its casting around the chamber of Harmodius’s mind.

But the experience began to leach at him somehow. He couldn’t put a finger on the experience to name it, but he felt as if—as if he
was
Harmodius—so he
was not
Gabriel. And it was almost physically painful, almost like dreams of leprosy or watching another man get kicked hard in the groin.