Gerflod Keep lay waiting, its open doors like the mouth of a grave.
Shouldering his axe, Skragdal trudged across the courtyard. He paused in the open door and cocked an eye toward the stable. Its roof sagged as a beam collapsed somewhere inside the burning structure, sending up a huge shower of sparks. Safe enough, he reckoned. Gerflod Keep was stone; stone wouldn’t burn.
He entered the Keep, his taloned feet leaving bloody prints on its marble floors, mingling with the tracks of the Fjel who had gone before. He followed their trail, opening his nostrils wide.
The stink of fear and lies had given way to the reek of terror and the stench of death. All along the way, Men lay dying; Gerflod’s Men, Earl Coenred’s men. Here and there, where they were unarmored and wore only livery, the Nåltannen had given in to old instincts, slitting their bellies with the swipe of a steel-taloned paw. Those Men groaned, dying hard. The Nåltannen had been in a hurry.
Skragdal snorted at the odor of perforated bowels, bulging and blueish through the rents in soft mortal flesh, oozing fecal matter. Those Men, clutching at their spilling entrails, still had terror in their eyes. Murmuring a prayer to Neheris, he raised his axe to dispatch them, one by one. Some of them, he thought, were grateful for it.
In the Great Hall, he found Osric and his Men. None of them were alive. Osric was leaning backward in his chair, grinning. A half-empty tankard sat in front of him and the hilt of a belt-knife protruded from his throat. It was a small knife, made for a Man’s hand, with the earl’s insignia on the hilt. A trail of blood lay puddled in his lap.
“Ah, Osric,” Skragdal said, with genuine sorrow. “I tried to tell you.”
The Staccian lieutenant continued to grin at the ceiling, wordless and blind. Near the head of the table there was a low groan and a scraping sound, a hissed curse. Skragdal trudged over to investigate.
On the floor, Earl Coenred writhed in his shadow, one hand clamped to his throat. Blood seeped through his fingers, where the rending marks of Nåltannen talons were visible. He did not, Skragdal thought, look so smooth with red blood bubbling on his ruddy lips. Stooping, he leaned in close enough to grasp a handful of the earl’s auburn hair and ask the question.
“Why?”
The earl’s eyes rolled up in his head, showing the whites. “The Galäinridder!” he gasped, catching his breath in a burbling laugh. “The Bright Rider, the Shining Paladin!” Droplets of blood spewed from his lips in a fine spray. “We did not welcome him, but he came. Out of nowhere, out of the mountains, he came, terrible to behold, and he told us, told us everything. Haomane’s Wrath is coming, and those who oppose him will pay. Even here, even in Staccia. There is nowhere to hide.” The earl’s face contorted as he summoned the will to spit out his last words. “You are dead, Fjeltroll! Dead, and you don’t even know it!”
“Not as dead as you,” Skragdal said, releasing his grip and straightening. Raising his axe, he brought it down hard, separating the earl’s head from his body.
The edge of his axe clove through flesh and bone and clanged on marble, gouging a trough in the floor and making his arms reverberate. Skragdal grunted. The earl’s head rolled free, fetching up against a table leg. There, it continued to stare at him under drooping lids.
Dead, and you don’t even know it.
“Fjel!” Skragdal roared, straightening, adopting General Tanaros’ words without even thinking. “Fall out! Now!”
THIRTY-TWO
It was due to the raven that no one else had yet died in the Unknown Desert.
Tanaros didn’t count the days; none of them did. What would be the point? None of them knew how long it would take to cross the desert on their meandering, uncharted course. When they could find shade, they rested by day and traveled by night. When there was no shade, which was most of the time, they marched beneath the white-hot sun. He put his trust in Fetch, in the gift of the Grey Dam Sorash, and led them staggering onward. Better, he reckoned, to walk toward death than let it find them waiting.
It didn’t.
Again and again, Fetch guided them to safety; to shade, to water. Hidden water-holes, drought-eaters, rocky ledges that cast deep shade, anthills, basking lizards, nests of mice: all these things the raven found. Tanaros followed his shadow across the parched earth, the raven’s squawk echoing in his ears, until they reached the place where the raven alighted. Again and again, Fetch preened with satisfaction upon their arrival, as they found themselves in a place where sustenance was to be had.
“How do you know?” Tanaros mused on one occasion, studying the raven where it perched on his forearm. “No raven ever traveled this desert, nor any Were. How do you know?”
The bright eyes gleamed. “Kaugh!”
It was a jumbled impression of thoughts that the raven projected; water, beetles and a tall palodus tree, a dragon’s head, rearing above the treetop. Over and over, the dragon’s head, ancient and iron-grey, dripping with swamp-water and vegetation, its jaws parted to speak or breathe flame.
“I don’t understand,” Tanaros told him.
Hopping onto a thorn-branch, Fetch settled and rattled his feathers.
“And why?” he asked the raven.
One bright eye cracked open a slit, showing him his quarters in Darkhaven, customary order giving way to mess and disarray. An injured nestling. A pair of hands, strong and capable, made to grip a sword-hilt, shaping themselves to cup feather and hollow bone with an unaccustomed tenderness.
“For that?” He swallowed. “It was a whim. A small kindness.”
“Kaugh.” The raven closed both eyes and slept.
In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they survived, step by step, day by day. But it opened a chink in his heart, that might have sealed itself like stone against the thought of love. When the somber faces of Ngurra and the Yarru-yami haunted his dreams, it gave him a tiny brand to hold the darkness at bay.
A small kindness, a confluence of compassion, had saved his life. Was that strength, or a weakness?
Tanaros could not say. If there had been compassion in his heart the day he learned Calista and Roscus had betrayed him, perhaps he would have found the strength to walk away. What brought them together? Passion? Compassion? They had lacked the strength to resist desire. And yet that thought, too, was anathema. In their hearts, they had already made a cuckold of him. Had they been stronger, he would have spent his life living an unwitting lie, and the world would be a different place.
He did not know if it would be a better one.
Nothing was simple.
“Lord General?” Another day without shade, another day’s trek. If there were a chink in the wall of his heart, it was Speros who thrust a wedge into it. Recovered from the ravages of dehydration, the Midlander had shown surprising and stubborn resilience, regaining sufficient strength to place one foot in front of the other, day after day, refusing the aid of the Gulnagel. Now he turned a sunburnt face in Tanaros’ direction, his voice wistful. “What’s the Lady of the Ellylon like?”
“Like a woman,” he said shortly. “An Ellyl woman.”
“Oh.” Speros returned his gaze to the desert floor, watching his feet trudge across the sand. It crunched rhythmically under their boots, under the taloned feet of the Gulnagel, who traded glances over their heads. “I’ve never seen an Ellyl,” he said eventually. “I just wondered …”