A King in Cobwebs Read online

  “The old man does not know his enemies, Black Durand,” Euric snarled. He snatched a lance from a stone-faced shield-bearer. What a master that boy had.

  “So be it,” said Durand. He roughly reseated his helm, wrenched one lance from the ground, and managed a quick salute to the duke and his daughter.

  Euric had already lashed his mount into a full gallop.

  Durand prodded Shriker on, even as Euric’s pell-mell rush gobbled up the ground between them. Durand felt the straps of his shield creak in his iron mitt. And, finally, he gave Shriker the spurs and chose a spot amid the riot of green charging toward him. He lowered the point, tensing—

  And there was nothing. Nothing but the rushing thunder of hooves and flying canvas.

  Drunken Euric had slipped in his saddle. Just enough to duck the lance: a drunkard’s luck.

  “Who’d believe it,” Durand muttered as an irksome smattering of applause broke out among the duke’s liegemen. There was even a laugh or two as Durand swiveled and caught his breath.

  “I’m the man in green, hunchback!” shouted Euric, helm in his hands. He had to probe a minute to get his right foot in the stirrup, but he was smiling. “This way! You can hardly miss me.”

  Durand hauled Shriker around, and the big brute wheeled hard enough to fling hanks of turf at the gawkers. Euric made a great show of hurrying his helm back in place.

  Durand tore down the yard, the nobles along the walls flashing past his visor. Euric leapt to match the charge, and, in twenty surging strides, the two knights collided. There was no mistake this time. Durand’s lance cracked like dry lightning, and the shock of impact nearly wrenched him from his saddle. His point had bitten hard.

  Astonishingly, Sir Euric trotted, apparently unhurt, toward his incredulous friends. His shield must have caught everything.

  “Impossible,” Durand muttered. The man had survived a second pass. And it occurred to Durand that Euric had the kind of luck that got other men killed.

  Stiffly, Durand rode for his remaining lance; old wounds had him breathing short. But he would not be beaten easily.

  He tore the second lance from the ground and faced his man.

  The two knights hung in pendulum’s stillness an easy stone’s throw apart. The wind over the yard danced for a moment with the green trapper round the legs of Euric’s horse. The filed edge of Euric’s lance-head glinted. Durand ran his tongue along the old broken edges among his teeth.

  This time he meant to stake Euric to the turf.

  He spurred big Shriker, his lance floating free of Shriker’s jolting stride. Euric’s storm of green and steel swelled in the slits of Durand’s helm, and he aimed for the heart of the man’s shield with a remorseless determination to teach Euric his lesson at last.

  Then, at the instant of contact—just as it all ought to have come clear—Euric’s lance twitched. Quick as a wasp, the heavy point was at Durand’s jaw. The thunderclap of its touch put Durand in the sky with torn rivets shrieking through his skull.

  He spun under the roaring Heavens.

  And slammed to the face of Creation in what might have been another age.

  The moments that followed were scrambled and elastic. There was a smell like hot copper reeking in his head, and he could hardly remember where he was. Everything was blood.

  He pawed at his face, trying to see while the castle yard pitched. There was a fight; he’d be butchered if he couldn’t move. Was the other man alive? Dead? Was he walking upright then, with a sword in his fist, measuring Durand’s neck? Or was he lying with a lance in his ribs?

  He forced his eyes wide.

  And found another impossibility. It seemed that the afternoon grass brimmed with uncanny shadows, all trembling like wine on a taproom table. They shivered, real and alive. And, even flat on his face, he remembered seeing such things before. Long ago with his onetime captain, Coensar. These were the Lost. For now, Durand squeezed his lips tight against a bulge of nausea and levered his face from the spinning field.

  Across a few paces of grass, he spotted the man in green, flat on the turf; they were like two drunkards waking on the same inn floor. The pig’s-bladder face was bare and pale. The impossible shadows swelled in the grass where the knight struggled. There were mouths. Durand saw the hollow ring of an empty eye.

  They were the Lost, the souls of the dead. Thirsty for blood, and wary of the Eye of Heaven.

  But Euric lived. Suddenly, the man was up and looming taller than Gunderic’s Tower. There could only be instants. Durand rolled to his knees and, with a wrenching effort, stumbled onto his feet, even as the shadows stirred round him like silt in ditch water. They lapped at the blood on his face. He breathed them.

  And he faced Euric, shield in hand.

  The two men reeled. The tip of Euric’s blade flashed in the grass, but his green shield was gone, and the arm that had held it now hung at a nasty angle. One good thing, anyway.

  Durand forced himself though the lapping shadows, weaving at the man in green. Only at the last did he realize that he’d no weapon in his hand; the chained flail he’d brought was still slung on his belt. But Euric didn’t wait. In a baffling clap of iron and splinters, Durand’s shield exploded from his fist and he was left with nothing. Euric had tottered past, striking, though Durand never saw him swing.

  “I have you, hunchback,” the man said, his voice slurred. “You’re mine!”

  Durand threw himself out of reach, struggling to haul the rattling flail from his belt; his left arm was still caught up in a mess of straps and splinters.

  Euric launched another hammer blow.

  This time Durand lurched close, swatting the man’s blade wide and managing a brawler’s butt over the man’s nose. Euric tottered around, blinking and gawping, but then he hoisted his blade and threw the flashing sword into an utterly baffling loop of flashes. A blow cracked down on Durand’s shoulder, its rebound nicking his ear. Euric followed with a flurry of blunted prods that bent Durand double, till he was bowing like a traitor before the headsman. Like a traitor before Gunderic’s Sword.

  Euric staggered back to swing his blade down from the Heavens, and there was nothing left for Durand to do. Against sense and training, he caught the blade in his fist.

  Here, the Lord of Dooms set his mark on the day.

  By rights, Durand’s fingers should have tumbled free like so many raw sausages, but Euric’s luck had abandoned him. Mail and leather held. And so, Durand gripped Euric’s blade, clamped in a vise of muscle and mail. And, for just an instant, Euric’s sword arm was stretched stiff. Durand took that moment to finally wrench the flail from his belt, lashed the iron head down over Euric’s shoulder, then yanked it whistling round and—with a dizzy spin before the hissing crowd—switched the ball of tines across Euric’s jaw.

  The force of the blow nearly landed Durand on his backside.

  For an instant, the flail’s head was nailed there, fixed like a burr on a couple of black spikes, but Durand’s stagger jerked the thing free. Even Durand had to wince. Once, he’d had the same treatment.

  Kieren the Fox put a crabbed hand up to ward his eyes as droplets splattered, and a few onlookers made the fist-and-fingers Eye of Heaven sign.

  Durand felt a greasy caul of blood over his own face.

  Euric, meanwhile, tottered a pace or two across the turf until, finally, he collapsed in a pool of shadows. The Lost lapped hungrily.

  Durand caught a few swallows of air; it was in his head that he shouldn’t look winded—a notion that soon had his head spinning. A dozen paces away, Abravanal stood, looking for all the world like an outcast grandmother in a rug beside him. The duke’s vindicated daughter clung to Lady Deorwen. The two women gave Durand a look he could not decipher before turning back into the castle. He guessed they did not approve.

  But Durand had a more immediate concern, for the yard teemed with slithering shadows like the spawning of dark eels under the skin of a brook, even as men came to gather up the stricken Eur
ic. Soft tongues slid over his boots and the backs of his hands. And, as Durand wavered there, he remembered seeing the Lost before in that place: ten years or more. He’d been sitting with Coensar—hero, friend, and traitor. A botched tourney had left a friend dead. And the Lost had been sad and forlorn and hungry as flies.

  Either Euric’s lance had cracked Durand’s head, or he was seeing the things in truth. Had they been with him all along?

  Before he could decide, a commotion started among the courtiers, and he looked up to see Sir Coensar, Abravanal’s Steward of Yrlac, ride through.

  Even bloody and calf-deep in dead men, Durand smiled.

  2

  A Rite of Fire

  Gray-cloaked Coensar rode at the head of a dozen armed men, gaunt as a wolf. Once, he had been Durand’s captain, the chief knight in Lord Lamoric’s Red Knight tourney band. Now, Durand’s old captain was called “steward” and “lordship”—and stood second only to Abravanal himself in Gireth and Yrlac.

  All this—all of these grand titles—had come to the man after he had nearly killed Durand and the duke’s son. The memory was knotted in Durand’s bones. In the midst of that wicked siege, Radomor the rebel had trapped Lord Lamoric beyond the walls. Durand had got the young lord free, and they had been flying over the market cobbles with the castle gates before them. But Coensar? Coensar had lashed out and—oh so very nearly—destroyed them all.

  Durand had not understood the fear and rage of a landless, aging fighting man watching a younger man take his place.

  Still, Durand had agreed to bite his tongue. So many had died. So much had been burned. People had seen such terrors. Gireth had needed a great man to lead them out of the disaster of Radomor’s war. And Coensar had been a hero—as far as most men knew.

  In the yard, Coensar stopped short. Here were Durand and half the barons of the two dukedoms. He blinked at bloody Durand, standing with the chained flail dangling in his fist and the wreck of Sir Euric sprawled before him. It was an ugly thing to be struck in the face with a chained flail. The tines. Durand could still feel the shape of Coensar’s flail when he touched the bones of his own brow and jaw.

  “The dullard spoke of Almora,” explained Kieren. Most of the gathered nobles found something fascinating to look at on the tops of their boots. “Now we will have to find a quiet room for him. And a surgeon, I think. A baron’s brother!”

  Abravanal tottered forward in his heavy robes, the only one grinning. “My steward! You have arrived in time for the Ascension. We have had our feast, but perhaps the kitchens can yet manage something.…”

  “Ascension,” said Coensar. The man had forgotten. “That explains the greenery. But, no, Your Grace, I’ve come to say that the high passes’ll be clear any day now. The king will expect us to run this Fellwood errand soon. If we’re to take care of our own problems in Yrlac, we haven’t much time.”

  “King Ragnal is young still. He has time.”

  “‘Before the first snows,’ was his word, Your Grace. And more than one man carried that word. And yet we did not move. But King Ragnal wants the Host of Gireth over the mountains and settling whatever’s stirring in the Fellwood Marches. I hear he is busy arguing with his brother in Windhover.” Another rebellion. “Already, the Sowing Moon has waned. Your Grace, it’s bad in Yrlac. Bad on your border. We must get our house in order before we set out for Fellwood.” As Steward of Yrlac, Coensar would have much to discuss.

  “Well,” said Abravanal, tugging his cloak tighter, “we cannot leave before Ascension, no matter what the condition of your high passes. Let us do our duty to the Creator, then we may do our duty to the king. The Eye of Heaven will not wait.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” said Coensar.

  Durand left the yard and its ghosts behind.

  * * *

  “WHAT DO YOU think you are doing?” Deorwen demanded.

  Durand’s chamber was a stone room up in Gunderic’s Tower, a foot or so longer than a grave. He had a pallet, a trunk, an arrow-slit, and a basin.

  Deorwen stood in the narrow doorway. Too near. Durand dripped and stank. He glanced from her face. He was stupidly conscious of her shape. “Lady Deorwen,” he managed.

  “Ah. You will insist on politeness, I see. Well, I must ask, regardless: What is in your fool head? Kieren is trying to keep this place together and you’re in the yard murdering your master’s liegemen.”

  “I am the duke’s champion. I’ve sworn to defend his honor and to protect Almora.”

  “A fine answer, but you do neither of these things playing headsman to every lout who cannot mind his tongue.”

  “Deorwen, there’s no time.” They required a much longer conversation, but hadn’t managed it in ten years—and a quick look at the arrow-slit showed that the Eye of Heaven was very low. The priests could not hold the sunset for a pair of laggards. “We must be in the high sanctuary. The last hour has come.” He peeled the mail and padding from his scalp, wincing at his stiff neck and thick ear. And caught Deorwen looking at the blood and bruises with a shiver in her eyes.

  She raised her gaze. “And Euric’s laid out in one of the bedchambers with the physicians. A fine Ascension Day. Honestly, Durand, how is Kieren meant to manage with a hall full of ladies, hawks, hounds, and barons—half from Yrlac and half from Gireth, all bickering and snarling—with Abravanal as he is? This whole little world of ours depends on him.” With Radomor dead and Almora unmarried, Abravanal held much of the kingdom in his old hands.

  “Deorwen, it was treason.”

  But Deorwen gave him a long, tired look—the like of which he’d seen many times. “And Creation might have come to an end for such a treason?” she said after a cold few moments, leaving him.

  Durand reached to shut the door, but Almora popped her head around the corner, startlingly close. He wondered what she’d heard. “Fear not, Sir Durand. It’s only that she’s had another of her dreams last night.”

  “Not another.” She saw the dead: the Lost. How many hundred such visions had Deorwen dreamt since the siege? Each vision the last memory of some Lost soul who’d died in the flames and fighting of those fatal days. “Until she finds the body and gives the poor thing rest, she never gets much rest herself.”

  “No.” She would search, sometimes alone, sometimes with the wise women of the town, hunting through the new city for the bodies of the Lost. And the burden of it pulled her away.

  “You mustn’t worry too much,” Almora said, and then she too vanished from the door, chasing Deorwen down the passageway.

  Durand shoved the door shut and blinked for an instant in the red light of the coming dusk. He peeled off sticky layers of mail and plates and canvas and tossed them into a heap in the corner. He scrubbed at the worst of the gore on his face with a rag from the basin. And then, to make certain, he fished a looking glass from the bottom of his trunk. As he raised the thing, something moved behind him.

  Durand spun. “Who is there? Deorwen?” he demanded, but the door remained closed. He looked around at the blood-tinged basin, trunk, door, bed … and saw nothing at all.

  Finally, he lifted the hand glass once more—and only then caught a glimpse of something reflected in the murky lens.

  “Host Below!”

  Pearl-dead eyes shivered in the shadow of his old bed, full of fever and incomprehension. And there were more. Durand gripped the mirror as he realized the freakish shapes crowded the dark chamber all around him, visible as dustings of soot and shimmerings of ash beyond the reach of any mortal light. A pair of long wings shivered with clinging moths. A white giant stood against the wall, its blank face as wide as the moon. Near Durand’s bloody basin, cracked nails scrabbled hungrily at the flagstones. The Lost. He had not left them in the yard; they had followed him, or they’d curled up in the cozy dark of his skull.

  He got hold of his courage and turned. And there they were before his wide, naked eyes, more than figments of the looking glass. Mottled shapes. Shoulders, wrists, uncomprehending faces.<
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  “Begone,” Durand breathed. “What do you want with me? I’ve done nothing. Begone by the King of Heaven!”

  At the Creator’s name the things exploded away, scuttling with more than the haste of vermin—shapes as big as men chittering down into the cracks of the floor.

  Snatching up a clean tunic, Durand bolted from the room.

  The last he saw as he shut the door was the pale bulk of the moon-faced giant.

  * * *

  DURAND RAN DOWN the steps of Gunderic’s Tower like a terrified child, but, though the last to reach the courtyard, he took an instant to check his pace before stepping out. The company was gathered at the gates to march out in the procession, with Almora and Abravanal in the lead. Still belting on his sword—a knight must wear a sword—he leapt aboard a skittish little saddle horse and barged into the crowd. Even rattled as he was, Durand couldn’t let Almora or her father ride unguarded, not when so much of Yrlac was up in arms.

  Before Durand could bully his restive mount closer, a fanfare brayed over the city and the ducal procession was off, plunging into the fairground streets of Acconel without him. Durand spotted the duke riding under the gates—riding through a curtain of crimson banners and into a sea of bright faces. Then, he spied young Almora trotting behind and spurred the anxious rouncy cruelly, catching the girl—and very nearly riding over a scowling Lady Deorwen.

  The crowd in the streets out-shouted the trumpets as the highborn wallowed into Acconel. Every window overhead fountained greenery with boughs and bunting and swags of flowers. Up front, crowned Abravanal teetered in his saddle like a parading icon while the crowd threw their garlands. He raised Gunderic’s Sword of Judgment, and the people sang paeans of joy. Almora’s eyes flashed. “Sir Durand! There are so many people. More than ever, since the war.”

  Flowers tumbled down on the beaming girl.

  “It may be, Ladyship,” Durand gasped, blinking at the rain of blossoms. “There can’t be a posy left for leagues.” But he felt as awkward as a bulldog in ribbons with the petals heaping on his black gear.