In the Eye of Heaven Read online

  In the Eye of Heaven

  Book Jacket

  Tags: Fantasy

  SUMMARY:

  From a strong new voice in epic fantasy comes the tale of Durand, a good squire trying to become a good knight in a harsh and unforgiving world. Set to inherit the lordship of a small village in his father's duchy because the knight of that village has been bereaved of his own son, Durand must leave when the son unexpectedly turns up alive. First he falls in with a band of knights working for a vicious son of a duke and ends up participating in the murder of the duke's adulterous wife. Fleeing, he comes into the service of a disgraced second son of a duke, Lamoric, who is executing a long subterfuge to try to restore his honor in the eyes of his father, family, and king. By entering tournaments anonymously as "The Red Knight," Durand will demonstrate his heroism and prowess and be drafted into the honors of the king. But conspiracies are afootdark plots that could break the oaths which bind the kingdom and the duchies together and keep the banished monsters at bay. It may fall to Durand to save the world of Man... Authentic and spellbinding,In the Eye of Heavenweaves together the gritty authenticity of a Glen Cook with the high-medieval flair epitomized by Gene Wolfe'sThe Knight, to begin an epic multi-volume tale that will take the fantasy world by storm.

  PRAISE FOR IN THE EYE OF HEAVEN

  "The world and its cultures that Keck unveils in In the Eye of Heaven are brutal and raw, and through it all the reader senses a fierce authenticity, a depth of knowledge in the author assuring that every detail, every nuance, is precisely as it should be. This novel marks the debut of an exceptional series, revealing the mythical depth and resonance possible within the genre of fantasy—a rare feat these days."

  —Steven Erikson

  "In David Keek's new fantasy, the gritty reality of medieval warfare is all the more believable against the backdrop of an Otherworld whose magic is rooted in folklore. Caught between them, the hero wins our sympathy." —Diana L. Paxson

  "A very intelligent book, with a hero who starts out as raw and physical as the world in which he finds himself but who proves able to use his mind to get out of the situations his body's gotten him into." —David Drake

  "Is it too early to label a writer visionary based only on a debut novel? Not when that novel's as impressive as In the Eye of Heaven ... This novel marks the arrival of a genuine new talent in the field." — Quill & Quire

  "A work of laudable ambition and a promising debut" —Locus

  IN THE EYE OF

  HEAVEN

  David Keck

  TOR

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ·IN THE EYE OF HEAVEN

  Copyright © 2006 by David Keck

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  Map by David Cain

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-765-35169-2 ISBN-10: 0-765-35169-2

  First Edition: April 2006

  First Mass Market Edition: March 2007

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  TO MY PARENTS, ElLEEN AND TONY, AND MY WIFE, ANNE, FOR THEIR FAITH AND SUPPORT. I HAVE BEEN VERY LUCKY.

  Acknowledgments

  First, I must acknowledge the support of friends in education like Carol Braun, Carmen Friesen, Chris Friesen, Leanne Braun, and many others over the years. As a student and as a teacher, I've met some of the best people I've ever known in schools. I also owe a great deal to writers and friends like Steve Lundin, Dennis Valdron, Ian Ross, and Darren Lodge who have shown quiet faith in my work over the years. On the professional side, my agent, Howard Morhaim, and editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, deserve credit for taking a chance on a new voice. Last, I offer my gratitude to every poor fool I ever dragged up a castle or around a ring of old stones. To all of you, and many more, I am grateful.

  In the fifth year of Ragnal's reign on the Hazelwood Throne.

  In the Year of the Sundering of the Heithan March.

  In the two hundred and fifty-ninth year after the Fall of the Burning City.

  IN THE EYE OF HEAVEN

  l.The Path of Knots

  Traveler's Night was coming on, and the horses were uneasy. It was almost as if they knew the numbering of days. Durand scratched the back of his neck, peering through drizzle and branches.

  He was meant to be riding home, guiding his lord up familiar tracks, but now he couldn't see for trees, and every breath of wind had the old forest alive with a sound like whispers. In an hour, it would be dark, and they would be caught on the road. On Traveler's Night, no one slept outdoors. Sir Kieren joked, "If I had known your father lived so far up in these wilds, I would have said, 'No reason to climb the forests of Gireth for your father's handouts, we'll have you knighted in the clothes you're wearing.' It isn't fine linen that makes a knight, after all. Now, I begin to wonder. In these wilds, a baron will have a house? Walls? Will he have a roof? Lad, if it's a bear's den, I won't think any worse of you—so long as I know."

  Durand glanced back. They called old Kieren "the Fox" and he looked the part: A small-boned man, he sported silver-tipped red mustaches that made him look as if a pair of the creatures had just jumped up his nostrils. It had been Sir Kieren's idea to make the journey, and, from the glint in the man's eye, Durand judged that the Fox knew how lost they were. "He's not quite a bear, Sir Kieren," Durand said. "And this village? Your inheritance? I would like to see little Gravenholm, I think. And meet this poor old Osseric

  whose grief gets you your fiefdom. The man whose son was lost upon the waves. Who lives alone in his forest hall knowing that his lord's obdurate youngest boy will have every stone of it one day."

  "Not this time, Sir Kieren." Durand meant to give Graven-holm a wide berth and head straight for his father's stronghold.

  The tracks he'd chosen would lead them leagues from Gravenholm.

  "I knew you had come down from the wilds," Kieren was saying, "but now I wonder what sort of—Host of Heaven!"

  As his master swore, Durand's head crashed into the branches. Brag, his big bay hunter, screamed and pawed the air so that only a wrestler's grip kept Durand in the saddle. He fought the maddened animal for a look at what had spooked it and caught a glimpse of a pair of yellow eyes flashing up from the track. Then Brag was rearing, and it was all Durand could do to hang on.

  After a moment, he found a better grip and took a look. Something had appeared between Brag's hooves: a pup, mottled leaf red and iron gray, and he could see the little fellow looking up with those yellow eyes, shrinking against the earth as hooves chopped down around it.

  "Come on, Brag," Durand said. "Come on. Calm now." And, though Brag was no warhorse, the steady pressure of Durand's voice calmed the hunter enough that he could step back.

  The pup shivered against the clammy track and looked up as Durand smeared bark and grit from his face. Suddenly he was not so sure the beast was a dog after all. He turned to say: "You know—"

  And the monster must have stepped out just then, for Durand found the Fox's face stiff and pale, his blue eye
s fixed on something.

  Slowly, Durand turned back.

  Gray and more massive than a man, a wolf flowed into the track only a few paces away. Never had Durand seen such a beast at close quarters. In the wastelands, a wolf was a sob on the wind and a winter thief of children, not a thing a man blundered across. Now, the brute's corpse-candle eyes caught Durand. Lost, and leagues from any village, he could not look away—lost things were what this monster hunted. Beyond the glowing eyes rose a rumble deeper than dungeon chains.

  While Durand and his master—both armed men—sat frozen, the wolf cub rolled to its outsized paws and nuzzled at the monster. The tiny creature paid no heed to the long spines of the brute's hackles. The wolf lowered its leering head. For a moment, black lips touched the pup's muzzle, gentle as a kiss.

  "God, it's—" Durand began—he was ready to confess surprise. He was ready to say he'd been wrong about wolves. But then the wolf's jaws sprang wide, swallowing the pup.

  Durand said, "Hells!"

  The word caught the beast's ear.

  It stared, and blood welled between its yellow teeth. For a long moment, the wolf held Durand in its gaze, then it tossed its head back and gulped the cracking bones.

  Impossible.

  Durand wrenched the sword from his gear. The wolf watched.

  Bulges moved against the walls of its belly, kicking and pawing more slowly and more slowly.

  "Host Below," Sir Kieren said. It's a prodigy." His small hands twitched into the fist and spread-fingers sign that mirrored the true Eye of Heaven.

  Durand gripped his blade. "Aye," he whispered. A prodigy: a sign scrawled by inhuman hands, pointing. The lamp eyes blazed as the brute smacked its jaws. Then, as suddenly as the monster had appeared, it coiled behind its leer and sprang in a long arc that cast it beyond the branches—it might as well have leapt right out of the world.

  All around them, Durand had the feeling that the Powers of Heaven and Hell were stepping between the trees, full of death and promises, with their eyes on his neck. A cold shiver passed up his sword, drawing the heat from his knuckles. Blood pounded in his throat.

  Sir Kieren spoke. "What doom does this foretell?"

  "I cannot guess," said Durand. "A priest might read something more in it."

  "It's always something with you around. I remember the Patriarch, old Oredgar, he held you in his eye one time: always wondered what he saw." Durand was about to question the man, but the old knight set the subject aside. "Let's see if there isn't somewhere in this wood we can get under shelter." They urged their horses on.

  And rode onto the doorstep of a village, the first in twenty leagues of lost wandering.

  "What is this place?" breathed Kieren.

  Durand stared, and, quite suddenly, understood where they had arrived.

  "—Gravenholm," he said. His own voice came like the wolf's rumble. "Your land?" Kieren whispered.

  After all this way, to strike his tiny inheritance after the wolf ... Durand managed a nod.

  "Hells," Kieren murmured. His hands formed the Eye of Heaven.

  There wasn't much for Durand to say. In the failing light, plowmen's furlongs crosshatched the fields. A stream meandered heavily toward the manor house. They called the river Plaitwater. He knew the house. He had stood in the hall, sat at the table, and listened to the old man's grief.

  "Gravenholm ..." murmured Kieren. "Your doorstep."

  "One day." Now, however, the current owner still lingered inside, a widower alone at the end of a dead lineage. Durand winced.

  "Bugger me," said Kieren in a cloud of breath. "Right, there's nothing for it. It's just a house. I want out of the weather. Come on. I don't think my heart can stand much more of this nonsense."

  The knight urged his little roan into the fields and began to pick a course from bank to headland. Somewhere, far off, a fiddle was playing.

  "Ah, listen there. That's better," Kieren said.

  Durand could see the pale squares of the peasants' windows hanging in the mist. Closer, long-horned cattle stared over the Plaitwater. They looked as though they were drinking hot broth.

  "And this must be Osseric's hall." A barn hulked by the water, flanked by a hall like a mountain of thatch on swollen timbers. "It's not so bad a place, though it would want a prop here and there if it were ever to serve as a fortress."

  One day, Durand would live in that hall, but that night he felt like a housebreaker moving through the master's rooms. Dusk had caught them, though, and they really had no time.

  Sir Kieren's eyes twinkled. "Which one's the barn, did you say?"

  "Not sure," Durand said. "It'll do me, whichever."

  "Surely. You are lucky to have the place. And I'd guess this moat is more to keep the stock from getting to the barley. Nothing unusual for a manor of this size. Not the mighty citadel of Acconel, but your father doesn't have a lot of liegemen. If it's all he could find..."

  It was more than Durand had any right to expect; there was little left for second sons in Errest the Old.

  "Good for ducks," the old knight continued. "Geese, a passing salmon, beaver. That sort of thing."

  "And me," said Durand. He'd spent fourteen years working to earn the place. His father could give him the old widower's lands, but, among the Sons of Atthi, only a knight could inherit a knight's land.

  They skirted the moat, Kieren setting a dawdling pace. Durand squinted into the heavy gray ahead where the gloom of sky and forest blended, thinking that Heaven's Eye would be there sinking beyond the clouds. They had almost run out of daylight.

  "Sir Kieren," Durand said, "we'll have to ride hard to make my father's stronghold by nightfall, I think."

  "Lad," Kieren said, "night's fallen. The baron must wait another night for his son."

  "It's hardly a league," Durand said. The sound echoed too loudly from old Osseric's walls. "It's a league to the Crossroads Elm, at most, and then it's straight on to the Col." They could be at his father's hall in no time.

  "It'll be full dark before we cross the fields, lad." Kieren leaned close, eyeing the smudge of forest. "You forget that wolf-thing out there?"

  "I'd be like a carrion crow at the old man's table."

  "By the King of far Heaven, it's the Traveler's Night. When you're safe inside, it's all feasts and firelight with no doors closed to anyone, but when you're under the stars? There are more than mortal doors under the vault of Heaven. What do you think it means that there are no doors shut? We will be the only fools on the road."

  "Sir Kieren, it is two leagues up a proper road."

  Up in Osseric's manor house, a figure passed an unshuttered window. Durand pictured the silence yawning out across the table in the man's hall, no sound but knives and smacking lips. There were no fiddles in the manor house. He would not go inside, not to count the old man's teeth like a horse trader.

  "With the Traveler walking and the tomb doors swinging, I don't plan to ignore the omen of the wolf. We've had our warning," said Kieren.

  "It's a bloody league!" Durand replied.

  And caught himself. This was not how a man spoke to either master or friend.

  Kieren had shut his eyes. "I remember when I first took note of you among all those strays at Acconel. A few of them were picking on some smaller boy. But you stood in their way. A little black-haired scrap you were, down from the Col of the Blackroots. In the face of three larger boys."

  Durand had often been in some trouble or another. He took breath. "Did I win?"

  Kieren winked. "You might have done if we hadn't pulled you off them. Go home. I'll catch you up tomorrow. Does that suit you?"

  Durand knew this was more patience than he deserved, and he knew he ought to apologize. But as he opened his mouth, a door clomped shut somewhere in the old manor hall.

  And he said, "Yes. Yes, it does." He bowed his head formally in the old country style. The last thing he wanted was to shame this man.

  "Done then, lad. I'll meet you in the Col of the Blackroot
s tomorrow if it is the will of the Silent King. Tell your father I hope to see him then."

  "I will do as you ask, Sir Kieren."

  Kieren inclined his head. "I will carry your apologies to old Sir Osseric. You give mine to the Traveler if you meet him."

  As he left Sir Kieren, Durand threw Brag into a long gallop, storming past the fiddles of Gravenholm village to plunge deep into the misty forest once more. Finally, in a place as silent as a sanctuary, Brag jounced to a halt. The animal huffed at the thick air. Durand stroked the hunter's muscled neck, no horseman if he'd treat an animal this way.

  Around him, mist steamed from the dark earth, thick as spirits. The Eye of Heaven had left him.

  "Come on," Durand said, nudging Brag forward.

  Ahead, the track meandered along the floor of a shallow and nameless valley. And, for the first time, Durand had a glimpse of how big a fool he'd been. The priests said that the Host Below swarmed every man's head, pulling and prodding. A tug of fear here and shame there. A night with poor old Osseric of Gravenholm would have done him no harm.

  He looked into the dark woods; there were ruins under the leaves.

  Since Durand could remember, they'd been telling Osseric story back in the Painted Hall of Acconel. The man's wife had died in childbirth: a love story ending with oaths and sorrow. But the pages and shield-bearers in the Painted Hall fixed their attention on the son: a boy who'd lived in Acconel just as they did, who'd slept in the very same straw. He was brave. He was strong. But when his greedy master boarded a ship for the Inner Seas, he had to follow. And the winds off the Harrow drove their merchantman onto the rocks where the bandy-legged fiends of that shore gnaw the bones of sailors.