His voice faded away as, quite suddenly, his eyes closed. Slowly, he sank back on to his pillow once again.
Marna clutched Gryss’s arm in alarm.
‘It’s all right,’ Gryss said. ‘He’s asleep. It’s the sleep-ing draught catching up with him. I don’t think he’ll wake again tonight. Not now he’s got most of that out of his system.’
He stood up and carefully rearranged Jeorg’s pillow and sheets, then he took the lamp from Marna and replaced its dimming cowl. As he hung it back on its hook by the bed he motioned Marna out of the room.
Returning to the room at the back of the cottage, he slumped down heavily into his chair. Marna sat opposite him. Her face was full of questions, but she asked none of them.
‘It is Rannick then,’ Gryss said, after a long silence. ‘There was no doubt about it that time, was there? No misheard whispers. No delirious rambling.’
There was a quality in Gryss’s voice that made Marna want to turn away. She felt tiny and helpless as the enormity of events became increasingly clear to her. What was she but a pathetic husk of inadequacy? She could not face grown men with their formidable strength, and their swords and their willingness to use them. Nor could she face Rannick with his unbelievable and seemingly diabolical powers; powers that raised a battering wind to protect the castle yet which could be used subtly to torment a helpless, beaten man. What was she against all this?
And even Gryss had been downed and beaten by what was happening. For all her life he had been a man who knew the answers to her questions, a man who saw through her with an eye keener than her father’s but whom she could twist to her own ends almost as if he were a mere child. She had not realized before what support she had drawn from him in the past. But now she did, for the support was gone.
Her loneliness was a grim revelation.
She felt as she imagined Jeorg must have felt when Rannick stopped him breathing. She felt the walls and ceiling of the cottage closing in on her, crushing, menacing…
She had to get away.
A thunderous banging crashed into her waking nightmare, making her start violently. She leapt to her feet, drawing in a raucous, terrified breath, seeing in her mind Rannick and Nilsson and his men circling the cottage, their horses stamping in the darkness and their intent focused on her just as it had been focused on Jeorg.
Her mouth dried and her legs began to shake. She turned to Gryss.
The banging continued.
And someone was shouting.
Licking his lips, Gryss half walked and half ran down the hallway.
Reaching the door, he threw it open.
An inarticulate cry greeted him and a figure blun-dered forward, seizing Gryss in a desperate grip.
Gryss took in the hair, wildly awry, the mud-spattered clothes, the wild, lost eyes and the deathly pale face of the third member of his conspiracy against the invaders of the valley: Farnor Yarrance.
Chapter 29
As they made their way through the village, Nilsson’s men remained silent and in close formation. The only sign of interest in their surroundings they had shown had been the ironic salutes that some of them had given to Gryss and the others, as they had stood, bewildered and uncertain, supporting the unconscious Jeorg, while the troop passed by.
Even after they had left the village some way behind, the men maintained their silence and their close formation. Then Nilsson raised his face so that the rain fell directly into it, and let out a low, rumbling laugh.
The sound was a comparative rarity, but it was fa-miliar enough to be recognized and it ran down the column gathering momentum as it went. Soon the troop was a loose, straggling band of men shouting, laughing and jeering.
One rider, the hood of his cape pulled well forward, pushed his horse through the mass to join Nilsson at the front. Nilsson turned to look at him and some of the laughter faded from his face.
‘A good trip, Lord?’ he asked.
Rannick threw back his hood and ran a hand through his unkempt black hair. There was laughter in his face, too, but there was no humour in it. Not that there was much humour in the laughter that rippled to and fro along the column. It was coarse and raucous and dedicated to the amusement derived from watching the sufferings of others.
‘A beginning, Captain,’ Rannick replied. ‘A begin-ning. I will confess that it was… interesting… to watch your men ply their trade. Stimulating, even.’
Nilsson smiled, knowingly. ‘The men were becoming restive, Lord,’ he said. ‘They needed the exercise and it was only a matter of time before they took it in the village here. Something which would have presented quite a few difficulties for us in the future.’
No sooner had he spoken the words than he cursed himself for a fool. He braced himself for Rannick’s response.
It began with a sneer. ‘I’ve told you before, Captain, you concern yourself too much about these people. I know them. A little… exercise… as you choose to call it would avoid difficulties with them in the future, rather than cause them.’
Nilsson bowed in acknowledgement, but offered no argument. It had been careless of him to touch on the subject of how to treat the local people, and he hoped now that his silence would allow it to fade away. It was sufficient that he had had his own way so far in keeping Rannick from inflicting some horror on them to satisfy whatever malice it was he had towards them.
Fortunately, Rannick chose not to pursue the mat-ter, though Nilsson sensed that it was rankling his new Lord and would surface again eventually. He sensed, too, that if it did so then almost certainly he would have to cease his opposition if he wished to survive.
Rannick looked at him directly, and his sneer turned into a malevolent smile. ‘I noticed that you too enjoyed the exercise, Captain,’ he said.
Nilsson inclined his head. Except for what you did to that villager who followed us, he thought, though this time he managed to remain silent. In that instance he had not had his own way. He would have preferred to let the men have their fun with him and then seen him safely dispatched. It would have been scarcely necessary even to hide the body, so deserted and little-travelled was the region. But Rannick had wanted exercise of his own and, that done, he had ordered that the man be returned to the village by way of an example to others. There had been no debate about it.
It seemed to Nilsson at the time to be a major error, but nothing would have possessed him to even hint at disagreeing with his Lord when he saw the look on his face as he worked his fearful way with the choking villager.
He shrugged his concerns aside. If the worst came to the worst as a result, then so be it. He and his men had dealt with worse problems than rebellious villagers in their time. He smiled to himself. It had been a good trip. They had not had one such for a long time. And apart from putting heart back into the men, it had also provided them with considerable extra supplies.
Faintly, from the edges of his thoughts like the sound of a distant ocean, came the strains of the grim chorus of the maimed and dying that had risen in the wake of his passing over the years. It was a little louder now, but he paid it no heed. It would fade, and though it was ever there, rumbling to the surface in his quieter moments, he rarely heard it and he never listened to it.