‘We are safe,’ Harmodius said. But his voice was more of a a sob than it should have been. No one is safe. What was that?
East of Albinkirk – Hector Lachlan
East of Albinkirk, the sun rose on the western slopes of Parnassus, the westernmost of the mountains of the Morea where the streams rushed down, heavy with the last of the snow and the spring rains to flood the upper waters of the Albin.
Hector Lachlan was drinking tea and watching the East Branch. It was high – far too high – and he was trying to figure out how he might get his herds over it.
Behind him, the men in his tail were breaking camp, packing the wagon, donning their hauberks and their weapons, and the youngest, or the least lucky, were already out with the herds.
While he watched, his tanist, Donald Redmane, stripped naked at the water’s edge and plunged in, using the edge of a ruined beaver dam as a diving platform. He was high spirited and strong and only heartbeats later, he was pulled out by the rope around his waist, his shoulder and collarbone bruised against the rocks.
Lachlan winced.
That night, something killed a stallion in their herd, and Lachlan, who had never fought an irk in his life, had to assume that it was some such creature who was responsible – multiple punctures and slashes from something much smaller than the horse. But the why of it eluded him. He doubled his herd guards, aware of how futile such measures could be. In the Hills, he had stone fences and deep glens with natural fortifications to take herds and guard them, but here, on the road – he was in the country that the drovers held to be safe. And something was hunting him. He could feel it.
Chapter Nine
Sister Amicia
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The fog was thin and wispy, but it did its job. It forced whatever was watching them to be more aggressive with the animals it was using. Rabbits came out of the woods in broad daylight. Starlings flew over the new diggings, first in pairs and then in swift flocks.
Toward midday, when Ser Jehannes had the double outer ditch dug and when the merchant adventurers of Harndon, Lorica, Theva and Albin were cursing their luck and their temporary taskmaster as the blisters on their hands popped, the Abbess cast again, the fog grew thicker, and the animals grew more numerous still.
By the time the nearly mutinous merchants were allowed to end their day and go to Mass, the fog was so thick that the watchmen on the fortress towers couldn’t see the base of their own wall. They could see the far horizon, though. The captain had no intention of letting his own fog put him at a disadvantage. Despite which precaution, wyverns overflew the fortress every hour or two, and the hearts of the defenders flinched each time the leathery wings passed. Out in the trees beyond the fields there was movement – the kind of movement a hunter sees when his quarry shakes a tree, or when a squirrel leaps to a branch too light to support the weight of the jump.
Michael opened a blank book of bound parchment, and wrote in his best hand:
The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day One. Or is it Day Eight?
Today the captain and the lady Abbess raised a fog with a powerful phantasm. The enemy are all around us, and many have commented that the air seems thick and difficult to breathe. Maddock the Archer was shot dead with a longbow arrow from the cover of a stand of trees when he ventured from the new trenches to retrieve a mallet. He must have left the cover of the lady’s fog.
There is a wyvern in the air over us. I can hear it scream. And I can feel it, even through the roof – a pressure on the top of my head.
Michael put a line through that last, and then very carefully inked it over until not a word was legible.
The captain has a sortie mounted and ready to ride at all hours. Every armoured man has a turn in the Sortie. He also ordered heavy machines constructed in the towers. The fortress has two heavy towers, and one now holds a heavy ballista and the other, lower tower holds a trebuchet.
The people of the countryside and the merchants of the caravans have dug a trench from the Lower Town all the way to Bridge Castle. It is deeper than a man is tall, and wide enough to drive a small wagon along the bottom. We are lining it with boards. The captain has ordered bags placed along the bottom and no man knows what is in them.
At sunset Michael went on to the walls, and joined with every man and woman in the fortress in prayer. They sent their voices up to heaven, and then the lady cast again, a simple sending such as any village witch might make, but aided, Michael hoped, by the wishes and prayers of every man and woman. She worked an aversion – the sort of thing Wise Women did for granaries on farms, which kept the smaller animals from eating the grain. She simply did it on a larger scale, and with a great deal more power.
West of Albinkirk – Gerald Random
Master Random’s convoy shook out early despite the adventures of the night, or perhaps because of them.
He was quite proud of them. Men were singing in the dawn – some shaved at mirrors hung from wagon sides, and other men sharpened blades, sharpened arrow heads and crossbow quarrels. Men were rolling their blankets tight against the damp. Others boiled water in copper pots, or heated up a cupful of last night’s porridge. At his own fire, the old Magus was heating ale in a copper shoe.
‘You seem content to help yourself,’ Random said.
Harmodius didn’t even raise an eyebrow. ‘I pay you the compliment of assuming that you are a generous man. And I made some for you.’
Random laughed. He was camping with a legend, who was heating him ale on a chilly spring morning.
Birds sang, and men sang, and Random could see young Adrian from the goldsmiths sitting on a wagon box and sketching.
Adrian was a pargeter – an artist in gold leaf. He was a likely lad, just about to leave apprenticeship for journeyman status, which would be a brief stop for him. His father was both talented and rich – one of the goldsmith’s coming men. Adrian was medium height, thin and fit, in expensive arming clothes made by professionals. He was wearing his breast- and backplate, his arming hood, and his armoured gloves lay across his lap. More and more of the young men were starting to ape the manners of the sell-swords – wearing their harnesses all day, carefully tending to their weapons.
Random couldn’t see what young Adrian was sketching – it was on the other side of one of the goldsmith’s wagons. Warm ale in hand, he went to look.
He smelled the thing long before he saw it. It had a horrible, sulphurous smell, overlaid with a sickly sweet-shop smell, like sugared liver.
He smelled the smell, but it didn’t warn him.
The dead thing had been a daemon.
Young Adrian looked up from his sketch. ‘Henry found it in the bush.’ The other goldsmith apprentice stood by the corpse with determined possessiveness, despite the horror of it.
Close up and dead, the daemon was deeply disconcerting. The size of a small horse, it had finely scaled skin, like a river bass or a blue-gill; and the scales varied from white to pale gray with veins of blue and black like fine marble – all surmounted by an opalescent sheen with all the colours of the rainbow. Its eyes were empty pits, the lids collapsed on them as if its death had robbed it of its eyes. It had a heavy, raptor-like head with a snout or a beak, and a crest like the plumage a man might wear on a tournament helm. It lay limp in death, like wilted flowers. It had two arms on its long trunk that were disturbingly like heavy human arms – the muscled arms of a blacksmith, perhaps – and heavy, powerful legs that seemed twice the size of the arms. Upright it must have stood as high as a man on a wagon.