A King in Cobwebs Page 4

  Abravanal blinked. “His Highness must understand that the snows came hard upon the heels of his messengers, barring the passes to every man under Heaven.”

  “To this our king has bade me say: Winter has ended, Abravanal of Gireth. The feast of the Ascension is past. We have been mindful of your service to us, but since the days of Radomor your house has profited from our patience. The peculiar fate of Yrlac and the trade concessions you won from Mornaway are much discussed among the councils of the great. They chatter while your grateful monarch stands by you, our servant. Can it be that you repay our faith with indolence?”

  Ordinarily, a monarch’s threats in the mouth of a deathless Herald would hold Durand’s attention. But, as the man spoke, Durand became conscious of movement in the darkest shadows. Sinuous shapes slipped through the cracks between the stones and soon the whole room seemed to writhe before Durand’s eyes. Durand twitched too quick for his twisted neck. Smoke-ring mouths gaped and eyes rolled like peeled eggs in a tub of ink. Near the door to the living chambers glowed the pale disk of the moon-faced giant from Durand’s cell. It seemed that the Lost had found him again.

  At the center of the hall, the Herald tugged his mantle tighter across his lean shoulders. “To you His Highness says: Our messengers are abroad with tidings of the great journey you are about to undertake, Abravanal. In the autumn, a tour of the forest barons might have sufficed to demonstrate our mastery. Now, it will no longer answer. And so we grant you royal license to host and hold a grand tournament beyond the Blackroots at the Lindenhall in Fellwood. You will be lavish with the proceeds of your conquests and alliances. While we settle the rebellion of my brother, Windhover, you, our vassal and ally, will prove to the restless lords in the Fellwood Marches that our power extends beyond the Blackroots and that, even in the Marches, none but Ragnal is king.”

  The groping Lost made their way over the straw and reeds. Durand almost jumped when Abravanal spoke: “The high passes, they might yet be shut against us.”

  Almora had taken her ancient father’s elbow.

  “To this Ragnal bade me say: Go to the pass, Duke of Gireth. By your oaths to us, if you find that it remains snowbound and shut to mortal men, wade thou to thy waist, and cry aloud, ‘I lament that I have lived so long that my weakness prevents me from fulfilling my duty to my king, but on the morrow I will find greater strength.’ And do so again each day until you find that you may walk farther. Gather your men and set forth before noontide tomorrow, or we will number you among our enemies, Abravanal of Gireth, and you will be beyond our protection with no safe place for you or yours between the mountains and the sea. We have sent Kandemar the Herald to accompany your party so that your deeds, good or ill, may ring throughout the realm.

  “So saith Ragnal, by the Grace of far Heaven, King of Errest.”

  “By the Grace of far Heaven,” whispered Kieren in that gloomy hall. “Very far indeed, some nights, it seems.” Ragnal’s threats and imprecations sounded far from heavenly, especially when leveled at a frail old man. Durand found himself clenching his fists, as if he might answer the king’s insult.

  Whatever the affront, Coensar’s plans for Yrlac were finished. There could be no timely talks with Leovere to avert disaster. Ragnal would not be put off. Not by an hour. And Abravanal could not go to war against an entire kingdom to force the issue.

  * * *

  LADY DEORWEN TOOK charge in Gunderic’s Tower, as she so often did. With stern glances, she persuaded Almora to seek her bedroom. At the same time, she caused a room to be cleared for Kandemar while gently badgering the deathless herald into a nodding agreement that he must be tired, so that Abravanal’s advisors could argue over Ragnal’s commands.

  There was a crowd now in Castle Acconel, thicker than before the sanctuary fire, as several banner knights had lost their lodgings in the city. The servants danced to Deorwen’s commands, unearthing pallets and ancient rugs from the darkest storerooms. Hot wine steamed. The Painted Hall filled with sprawled bodies, and the Lost retreated before the crowd, slipping back into the cracks and black passages of the tower.

  At the high table, Durand sat with Kieren and Coensar long into the night. The two old commanders debated endlessly, hoping to find a means of keeping Abravanal’s lands secure while every knight in Gireth rode for the mountains. But it must be exile or expedition, and no quantity of disputation could make a bit of difference.

  Durand yawned.

  Kieren laughed at him, his fox mustaches twitching. “I had a dog who yawned like that, once upon a time. A big brute he was.” He grinned at Coensar. “One of those short-muzzled butcher’s beasts. Stiff neck. Thick as a barrel. White as a bone with a big black eye. You’re the living spit, after your bout with Euric.” He bobbed his eyebrows. “That dog scared me to death.”

  Even Coensar smiled—something Durand had rarely seen in the last ten winters.

  “You may as well let us gnaw at this one, Durand.” Kieren hugged himself and shivered. “We’ll never find our way out, but sometimes the inevitable needs a bit of talking. Out of respect, I think. Go on, get to bed. We’ll be up at cockcrow if we’re to pack this household up by noontide.”

  Unfolding stiff limbs, Durand made to leave, but found the black mouth of the chamber passage a source of stupid, childish dread. Serving men and handmaidens had been walking in and out all night, but the black mouth of the thing looked to him as though the darkness visibly brimmed and bulged with living shadows. Still, he saw no way around it.

  “Goodnight,” he said. “We shall see what the morrow brings, I suppose.” And, with a painful nod to his onetime mentors, Durand stalked into the doorway, pushing through shadows that were a bit too much like cobwebs. But the Lost were harmless, or nearly so, and housemaids had been bounding through them all night. So Durand pawed his way up the dark passages of Gunderic’s Tower till he found his own door.

  Standing in the black little room, he took a few deep breaths to master himself. Finally, he shot the bolt and lowered himself into his bunk, shadows be damned.

  * * *

  HE TRIED TO sleep, and, for a time, the pell-mell violence of the day dragged him deep.

  But there were eyes upon him, and, as each furtive watcher added its scruple of dread, he soon feared to lie in the teeming, intimate darkness.

  Figures surrounded him like mourners round a sickbed. There were empty-faced men. There were things cobbled together from nightmares. And each of them seemed far more solid now than they had been in daylight. Real as curtains round the bed, these were no filmy shadows, but beings with weight enough to stop the feeble moonlight. He could hear tongues and spines and talons move. Some were squatting over his basin. A pair of pale men held his surcoat between them, sucking absently at the black broadcloth where they must surely have found blood. Beyond them all was the moon-faced giant, standing by the door. They watched him impassively.

  Durand stared back. Coensar’s shadows he could endure, but these were altogether different. Madmen in the streets ranted about the spirits teeming in Creation, but was this what they saw? Had he always been surrounded by these things? Were they sent from the Host Below to collect him? Had the knock from Euric’s lance driven him mad? Was he dead already?

  Durand took hold of himself. He could not be dead, not with his fool heart beating fit to crack his ribs. The rap on the head had likely rattled something loose. It must be that. He was not mad, and he would not go haring off down the castle halls screaming about the spirits in his bedchamber. If they had always been there, then Creation was as it had always been, and he must become accustomed to the sight of these things.

  “What do you want of me? Why do you plague me, of all men?” The words rasped between clenched teeth, but the things looked on without an answer.

  He pressed his eyes shut for an instant while his heart galloped. And he heard a step from the passage beyond his door, an impossibly ordinary sound: Deorwen’s step. She would have dreamed of some Lost soul, and now she
was off to search the streets. Durand felt a prodigious urge to call out, more like a child than a man.

  One of the dusky things leaned a little closer.

  And Deorwen’s footfalls were gone.

  The leaning thing peered into Durand’s eye. Its skin was as white and real in the moonlight as runny cheese. And its eye was a fish-scale ball of black and blue and silver.

  Durand thought, for a moment, that he recognized the face. It had only one eye and there was something about its fat throat.… But he could not quite remember.

  Choosing a spot on the ceiling, Durand waited for cockcrow, willing the madness away, and trying to ignore the shapes crawling the walls.

  3

  Familiar Spirits

  The next morning, Gunderic’s Tower bustled like a great black anthill, with the Herald standing motionless in its midst. Messengers charged out. The yards filled with workmen and clouds of sawdust. And, inside the tower, serving men scurried in torrents down every passageway, catching up every object from candles to coats of mail and depositing them all in the yard.

  Of mortal men, only Euric’s comrades—a few dozen knights of Swanskin Down—were still. They sat a grim vigil on the benches of the Painted Hall.

  All of this, Durand had seen with his own eyes. Since before cockcrow, he had been hard at work; he much preferred hauling baggage and the occasional brush with a Swanskin knight to snuggling up with Lost souls in his bedchamber—though he soon learned that the devils were plentiful enough even in the Painted Hall. They chittered in dim corners and gaped at the goings-on among the living with a vacant species of curiosity.

  Durand fetched and carried like a serving man to occupy his mind.

  Kieren called across the crowd as Durand lugged one half of some knight’s trunk toward the entry stair. “Durand! See if you can’t ford this cataract of baggage and get over here. His Grace will need a word with you in a moment.”

  At the head of the Painted Hall, the duke and his two stewards clung to the high table. The table on its dais might have been a raft in a flood as Durand approached.

  “This early in the year we’ll be short of victuals, no matter what we do,” Kieren was saying. “There hasn’t been a good harvest since Durand here was in diapers— Good morrow to you, Sir Durand. Have a glass of beer. You look thirsty, boy.” A jug bobbled toward him. “And the larder won’t have the salt pork we’ll need. You can’t kill a beast and pickle him the same morning.” Kieren’s mustache bounced as he worked at a bit of bread. “Still, we won’t need so many barrels if we’ve nothing to put in them, so that’s a blessing.”

  “And what of those birds?” demanded Abravanal, blue eyes clouded. He lowered his voice with a glance to the Herald. “There he appears, the Herald, like one of the Powers of Heaven, and my Painted Hall is full of birds. It was the middle of the night. What were they?”

  Kieren munched. “The birds, Your Grace? Starlings, perhaps. Durand, have you eaten?” The man passed Durand a hunk of bread.

  “We will bring a strong company,” said Coensar, “and keep most of the men in mail coats right through to the Lindenhall. If we can’t bring an army, we’ll make sure every man is ready for whatever comes. I didn’t like what I saw on the roads. Bad winters breed wolves.” This last was an old saying among the Sons of Atthi.

  “The devils flew in one window and down the stairs right past us,” continued the duke, fixated. “Must have been a thousand! Is there an omen attached to starlings then?”

  “None I can think of, Your Grace,” said Kieren. “Though I knew a woman once who taught one of the little devils to speak like a very Son of Atthi. I hear they have a talent for it. Mimicry. And they’ve a filthy tendency to come in great stinking mobs.”

  Coensar was shaking his head. “This ride to Fellwood will cost us dear, I reckon. I wouldn’t leave Yrlac behind now, not without a royal command.”

  “And the Herald of Errest standing guard with his hourglass?” Kieren added, nodding his head toward the Herald and his curious vigil. “We shall leave the city as full of soldiers as we may.”

  “Another week and we might have brought Leovere to the table.”

  “Leovere!” said Abravanal. “A bandit. Bring him to the table indeed. You would dine with wolves and wild dogs?”

  “Now, both of you,” said Kieren, punctuating with the heel of his bit of bread. “We’ve talked enough of Yrlac. How well we know our troubles there! But we have the Fellwood in front of us—a great ocean of trees and darkness stretching from the mouth of Pennons Gate to beyond the ken of living men, while our halfwit countrymen are dabbling in its shallows. The Fellwood will require thinking about.”

  “Men go where there is land to be had, and three hundred winters have passed since the Solantine Knights still watching the Pennons Gate have seen the Enemy. Once, the Sons of Heshtar held all the southlands. In these days, the maragrim thralls. The turnskins. Gone beyond the inner seas, as like as not. It’s no surprise our countrymen have brought their broad axes to those empty lands.”

  At the far end of the high table, someone approached the foot of the dais.

  From Durand’s spot on the floor, he couldn’t make out the man’s face. The table stood between them.

  Durand took the man for a messenger, but not a soul at the table took notice.

  “Here’s my trouble,” said Kieren. “Men in Fellwood are too free with their axes. In Errest the Old, the wise women know what haunts the trees and ponds and rivers. In Fellwood, there are men cutting timber on land that the Sons of Atthi have not commanded since—since I don’t know when.” The work of guessing screwed up his face. “It must be the days of the High Kingdom, anyway. Say twenty, thirty lives of men?

  “And so, when King Ragnal hears of trouble down in the Fellwood Marches, does he imagine we’ll find only rascal knights and runaway plowmen? A scattering of upstarts needing a strong hand to remind them of their duty? I will be glad indeed if it’s nothing but a few headstrong settlers.”

  While Kieren spoke, Durand’s mysterious messenger abruptly climbed right up onto the dais by the high table. Kieren and Coensar made no move, though the fellow was likely close enough to touch the duke’s cloak.

  “Well, Almora is not going,” the duke was saying. “Not to Fellwood. Not over the mountains.” The duke registered Durand’s presence. “Durand? Good. Yes. You will remain here with her, watch over things. She must be safe at all costs.”

  As Durand shifted to catch a look at the stranger’s face, he hardly heard Abravanal’s command, and it was only when all three lords had turned his way that he realized that his assent was required: “Yes, Your Grace.”

  The stranger must have swayed a convenient inch or two, for just then, Durand got a look. Brown spots crusted a broad bandage round the man’s forehead. His face was white as lard and slack as a pig’s bladder. Why had his appearance caused no alarm?

  “Euric?” Durand murmured.

  In the hall, Euric’s countrymen ignored the battered lord completely.

  Still, Euric stared with eyes like boiled eggs, his mouth agape. The poor devil had clearly escaped his sickbed in the commotion.

  “What?” said Kieren. “What was that, Durand?” Euric had set one hand on the table linens while the others waited for Durand’s answer.

  Then, abruptly, the pale bladder of his face twitched toward the chamber stair.

  “Durand, what were you saying?” Kieren began.

  But shouting rang from the stairway—men’s and women’s voices both. Euric’s slack face quivered. And a young man—one of Acconel’s serving boys—stumbled from the doorway.

  “Host of Heaven,” he said, and remained half-bowed before the Duke of Gireth.

  “What is it, boy?” said Coensar.

  “A messenger,” gasped the boy. “A man from Swanskin Down. He’s come to join Sir Euric, bearing messages. He is Euric’s shield-bearer.”

  “Unfortunate,” said Kieren, adding kindly, “But I suppose Euric c
ould do with a visitor.”

  “No, Lordship.” The serving boy twisted his tunic in his fists.

  “No?” said Kieren, surprised.

  Footfalls resounded on the chamber stair. “Host of Heaven! Someone should have stopped him. We could, at least, have warned him,” quailed the serving boy as a shield-bearer tramped from the stair: a sturdy young man with his hair cut square; he was splashed with clay from a hard ride down the Wrothsilver Road.

  The shield-bearer might almost have been drunk as his dark glance flashed over the room. “Dead,” he gasped, as if puzzling at the problem. “The baron’s brother.”

  There was something half-familiar about the young man’s face.

  “This is Ailric, Your Grace, Your Lordships,” the horrified serving boy stammered. “Lord Euric’s shield-bearer. Or he was.”

  The duke rose. “Ailric. It was Ailric? I do not understand you,” he said, leaning across the table. The men of Swanskin Down were on their feet.

  Ailric faced the high table, even managing a stiff bow. “Your Grace … I came bearing tidings for Sir Euric: word from Milord Vadir, Baron of Swanskin Down for Sir Euric. Sir Euric and I had recently been separated. A death in my family.” He glanced back to the chamber stair.

  “My condolences, boy. Surely, he had a shield-bearer yesterday? God. It was only yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “A borrowed man, I expect,” said Ailric.

  “I’m sure. Yes. And Euric’s injuries? Had you heard?” asked the duke.

  For just a moment, Ailric’s mouth was an empty slot. “Your man took me up, Your Grace, and admitted me. Sir Euric was dead of his wounds.”

  Durand glanced to slack-jawed Lord Euric there beside him—and, in an instant, Durand understood the man’s strange and gaping stare. Euric looked no more human than the day’s catch on a fishmonger’s slab. The Lost lord’s pallid hand splayed on the tablecloth near Coensar’s.