A King in Cobwebs Read online

  Without another thought, he set off along the black foot of the ravine wall—never more than a pace from the nearest rocking spine. He crawled on his belly, trembling with cold and fatigue. Soon, however, a bulge in the wall narrowed the passage and forced Durand near to the mob. He clung to the slime, not touching, moving as soundlessly as a living man could manage.

  Finally, though, the walls shoved him too near, and one of the whisperers rose from the muck. It was the graybeard maniac who’d led the attack back on the road. The man must have felt Durand’s breath on his neck.

  “I can feel their eyes upon me,” the madman was saying under his jittering hawthorn crown. “The same smirk on the face of every groom and serving man when my head is turning, as though every devil in the palace shares the same bloody joke. It is past bearing! Oh, and there are signs upon my son as well. Slow to answer. Watchful. Poisoned against me. Devils! I have lost them all, but they will not have me!”

  The madman did not see, and Durand had no time to think of faraway kings. As he inched around, he winced at the graybeard’s every sudden motion. Then, there came a snap of wings over the mob and two black and ragged shapes tumbled against the Heavens, perching on the brink.

  One cocked its head. “Ah, here he is, brother.”

  Durand closed his eyes, as still as one of the roots in the mud. He dared not breathe. The madmen had stopped their rocking. It seemed that they listened.

  “Indeed, yes. That is him. But he seems to have come down in the world somewhat since noontide.”

  “I should say so. How like worms in the earth these creatures look. Is this a grave trench, do you think?”

  “No, no. You see? They are moving. Hello! Do you suppose they can understand our speech, brother? See how they jump.”

  “Now, where has Durand got to?” said a Rook.

  The mob came uncoiled, craning and gaping, dashing themselves to the muck. Durand was accustomed to the devilish whispers, but for these creatures in the ditch it must have been a new shape to madness. And so the ravine filled with flying heels and hands and elbows—until the graybeard mashed a clawed hand onto Durand’s face.

  “Oh, my brother, that’s no good. I fear we’ve rather put him in it now.”

  In an instant, all the churning coiled tight, clutching Durand like a fist.

  The mad beggar held Durand eye to eye under the bloody brow of the hawthorn crown. “What is this? What is this!”

  Behind him, the mob twisted, flexing like a single worm of thronging limbs, piling up the wall in a heap, always with the bearded man at its heart. “What is this?” they echoed, the words darting from mouth to mouth.

  “Your face!” the man snarled. “I know this face!”

  The others were a chorus: “Your face! Your face!”

  He grabbed Durand’s collar. “The hitched lip. The beard, black as devils!” A hundred eyes blinked down on Durand—the faces mashed together like cells in a wasp’s nest. The bearded man crushed Durand’s hated face into the slime.

  It was incomprehensible.

  “Wild and wretched! Red as beefsteak. With the crown, spinning and ringing empty on the stones.” His eyes rolled as free as marbles in their sockets. “A bursting, burning face! And it is a fire I would put out!”

  Distantly, Durand heard the Rooks take flight as fifty clawed hands caught his limbs. He plunged for freedom, but the hooked nails of a hundred fiends held him. It was all he could do to wrestle his knees up, to twist from the claws at his eyes. Nails shredded his skin. He would be torn to pieces, dying beyond the knowledge of men.

  Until, with an impossible suddenness, the whole thrashing multitude stopped, frozen as stiff as branches.

  Durand hung in two dozen rigid hands like a bird impaled upon a thornbush. Only the heaving of the beggars’ lungs showed that they had not been struck dead.

  “Hells,” said Durand.

  First came the dull light. Through the puzzle of their contorted limbs, Durand made out a round white shape, like a chamber pot in the twilight. There was the pale glow of his moon-faced giant, and beyond it, the empty stare of old Euric, his jaw slack while the rest of his company were limping and slinking in. The sudden stillness was not a reprieve, Durand realized. In this nameless ravine above the banks of the Banderol, the Lost souls of Acconel Castle had found him.

  Perhaps this was why they’d gathered all along. This was the reason they had sought him out in Acconel. This was the moment of his doom and Durand’s victims had come to bear witness.

  “Damn me,” said Durand. “Damn this all!” He must get loose. In a moment, the beggar crowd would wake and turn upon him.

  Durand pulled his collar free of the graybeard’s fist.

  The man’s eyes snapped around, seeing Durand—and his inexplicably hateful face.

  Then, just before the crowd could fall upon him, there was a third arrival.

  A shriek shot from the dark upper reaches of the ravine, and every living being spun. An explosive racket battered the stones of the streambed, charging nearer. There were chains in the sound, and the scream returned, louder still, and closer. The mob convulsed. And a vast black shape rampaged into the very heart of the madmen’s lair.

  But Durand knew this monster—he’d picked every one of the fiend’s hoofs a thousand times. It was Shriker.

  Durand leapt from the mud and the reeling mob onto Shriker’s back, seizing on to the stallion as it bulled through specters and madmen and out into the blackness. Hands caught at them. The accursed graybeard maniac threatened to haul him down—snarling, ranting, and leaving nothing for Durand to do but kick as they lurched toward the black river. The horse must surely break a leg.

  The madman clung; he caught Shriker’s mane. Shriker swung for the riverbank, careering past uncounted invisible trees in the failing light. In a moment, both riders would tumble off and Durand would be dead against some tree stump, or back among the mob. He stamped down with the force of desperation.

  His heel struck the graybeard’s brow at a moment of fatal ill-fortune for the old devil—the bole of some great tree was just then flashing past. One instant, the man’s face snarled up at Durand; the next, the man was dead, smashed past recognition with a jolt that nearly took Durand’s leg.

  And, just as he careened around the corner for the upriver road, Shriker now at full wild gallop, he found Deorwen in the track.

  The beggar’s tumbling corpse rolled to a halt between them.

  * * *

  DEORWEN WAS WAITING on her own mare, with Brand’s bridle in her hand, and there was a commotion as Shriker came roaring up. Durand nearly hurtled over the brute’s neck.

  The horses jostled them very close.

  “Durand! Thank Heaven.” She looked to the horse. “We’re lucky he hasn’t broken a leg already. He will have picked up thorns, at the very least.” She was already turning. “Ailric is meant to be here by now. I’ve been careless with that boy’s life in all this. Host of Heaven, it’s dark.”

  He felt her hand awkwardly grip his arm. The night breezes sent her dark hair to lick his jaw, and he blinked stupidly at memories of past closeness.

  “You’re alive,” Deorwen said.

  There was a moment that she leaned close, but then there came a sound from the crossroads and willows, and Ailric was darting into the trail, swarming nimbly onto Brand’s back.

  “I met a man or two on the way back,” was all Ailric said by way of explanation—all he said about fighting madmen in the dark. For Durand, these two had nearly got themselves killed.

  “There is no time,” said Deorwen.

  Durand’s Lost companions were already tumbling into the roadway.

  “Almora is out here somewhere,” Durand said. He closed his eyes for an instant, wondering how long it would be before he was as mad as the graybeard beggar king.

  There were cries among the trees: the beggars were gathering themselves.

  “If she hasn’t had the sense to seek shelter, Durand, it is too
late for her by now,” Deorwen said. “There is no moon tonight, and Last Twilight is upon us. Every spirit of well and stone is stirring by now. If we do not take care, there will be no one to rescue the girl. It will be dark as a mine before we can cover half a league. Hurry. There will be a village somewhere beyond these trees and hedgerows. Host of Heaven, we should not be abroad. It is already too late.”

  Ailric had one foot in the stirrup.

  “Get the dead man,” said Durand. Only the Hells knew what would happen to a murdered corpse on Calends.

  * * *

  THE ANIMALS SLIPPED and jostled between the ruts as the flowers faded among the thorns. Bonfires glittered down the black valley of the Banderol. These would be hagfires, kindled by the wise women and priests of village after village. In this night between moons, the Queen of Heaven gave way to the Hag, consort of the Son of Morning and mother to monsters. To Durand’s bleary eye, the hagfire lights seemed to pull the starry Heavens down around them.

  Ailric scouted just ahead of the little party, nimbly slipping on and off Durand’s packhorse whenever there were signs in the trail. Maybe he was a little more eager with the dead man over his saddlebow.

  Durand’s train of dead men brought up the rear.

  Finally, Ailric was calling out with good news. “There is a track. Well-trodden, I think. But small.”

  “We’ve no time,” said Deorwen.

  A deep and hedge-crowded track opened like a black door in the ghostly hawthorns. The track was narrower than Durand liked. Anything that crouched among the thorns would be a step from Deorwen’s throat.

  “It will be a village,” Durand said, though he could not be certain. “I will lead.”

  He slipped down, taking a only single step, his hand on Shriker’s bridle, when the whole empty track exploded into silent motion. Shapes boiled off in a thousand directions. And Shriker nearly jerked Durand’s arm from its socket.

  Durand held on as the gray shapes swarmed away like cobblestones come to life. As quick as they came, the strange shapes drained away into the tangled hedges.

  “Host Below,” Durand hissed. He’d got the flail out. “What in—”

  “Rabbits!” said Deorwen.

  Durand jammed the flail back in his belt, puffing, “Host Below.” The things had been invisible until they burst into motion. “Hells.”

  Deorwen had no patience. “The champion and his fearsome charger. Rabbits. Get a move on! It’ll be worse than rabbits in a moment.”

  In a hundred fumbling paces, the hedge gave way, and they entered a cool place as dank as the old ravine. The air was thick with growing things, rotting thatch, and the manure of penned animals. Somewhere a big dog was growling, tied to some plowman’s doorpost, though Durand could not say where. Not a soul was moving.

  “There,” whispered Ailric, and Durand spotted a dark shape against the stars. “That’ll be the sanctuary. The tower’s too narrow to defend.” The merest trace of a bell tower could be seen above them, and Durand thought he could make out a low wall, enclosing the whole thing.

  “We’d best set your friend down in the sanctuary yard,” said Deorwen. “He’ll trouble no one.”

  Ailric answered: “The priest will curse us.”

  “On Calends, the body’s best on sacred ground,” said Deorwen. “In the morning I’ll need a word with the village women. Maybe we’d best try to get into the sanctuary ourselves. Quick.”

  Durand gathered the beggar’s corpse in his arms, mounted a low bank, and made to hoist the body over the wall. Somewhere the dog kept up its low growl, putting the horses on edge, even Shriker. Durand found the top of the wall and lifted. Over the devil went.

  “Stop!” ordered a voice.

  A fire blazed up with a rush of heat that had the horses rearing.

  “Go no further!”

  As Durand turned, flames were still climbing a great heap of dry pine boughs. There must have been plenty of grease and dry kindling in the stack.

  A squat and ancient woman stood in the crazed light. She was bald to the top of her head, and an open sore wept where her nose ought to have been.

  Deorwen strode out. “Have you been waiting in the dark all this time to spring that on someone?”

  The old woman knotted both hands on the head of a walking stick. From her puckered expression, Durand guessed that she had no teeth in her upper jaw. “It is the hagfire!” the woman announced.

  “The hagfire? Only now? Old woman, nightfall is long past. Where have you been until now?”

  “Two may play at posing questions, I think.” She sucked a breath with a smack of her lips. “Why do we find you skulking about on Calends?” And, over fences and berms, from sheds and hovels, every plowman in the village now appeared to glower in a great ring—a mattock, a billhook, or an axe clamped in his fists. “What’s your business here this ill-omened night?”

  Deorwen looked into the vault of Heaven. “We’ve been caught on the road. Any fool can see we’re no spirits, surely.”

  “Aye. ‘Surely.’ But there’s something about you three. The tall one with the scars: He’s been using his fists, I reckon. Black with mud. Red with blood.” She was almost sniffing at the air then, searching for the other something—Durand’s ghosts, perhaps. “And we’ve found more devils than just the Hag’s brood on the roads these last weeks.”

  “Do you imagine that we were part of that naked mob at the river? Is that what you’re thinking?” Deorwen said. “That we’ve just popped on a few clothes for an evening in the village after a few week’s living in a ditch by the Wrothsilver Road? Or do you imagine we’re a troop of raiders from Yrlac, the three of us?”

  The old woman grunted. “No, you’re no riders from Yrlac, young woman. And you’re right that we’re late with our hagfire. Today, His bloody Lordship commanded every soul into the fallow fields. Every acre must be under the plow. But I’ve told His Lordship: He may seed a thousand fields, but he’ll have no harvest. The end is nearly upon us. Soon, we shall choke on nightmare. I’ve dreamt it all! But His Lordship will not heed me.”

  The villagers pulled uneasy faces, uncertain where to look.

  “And so the hagfire was late…?” said Deorwen.

  “And so the hagfire was late, girl! And so madmen pack the roads! And though His bloody Lordship hangs a hundred beggars at the crossroads, the fool will not turn back the end.”

  There was a moment of muffled conversation from high above, followed by a flash of torchlight and cursing. From his spot by the sanctuary wall, Durand heard the sound of a door slamming. He made out torchlight on a hillock and the flank of a tower. Finally, there was a man snuffling his way through the crowd, accompanied by a wake of villagers muttering, “His Lordship!” the man broke through the ring of villagers and stepped into the light.

  The lord of the place was homely as a fighting dog and naked except for a blanket, a stout crossbow in his hands.

  A knuckly crook of a nose gave the man’s face the look of a blunt axe. “So who are you, then?” His eyes could have been two black studs. “Out with it. You’ve got the whole village out of their beds.”

  Deorwen sighed.

  “I am Deorwen, Lady-in-Waiting to Her Ladyship Almora, the daughter of His Grace, Duke Abravanal of Gireth.” She nodded toward Durand. “At the wall is Sir Durand Col, the Duke’s champion.”

  The man’s mouth opened and shut. The blanket did little to cover his hairy limbs. “Blast,” the man grunted. “You’d best come along.”

  He bandied through the ring of bondmen toward a stout, half-timbered hall below the tower, but not before shouting to the old woman: “Mother, you’d best come as well. I’ll wager this has you all riled up again.”

  While Durand gaped, the old woman grunted, following along.

  * * *

  “I AM TUROLD, Lord of Towerknoll, and you are welcome,” said the grizzled man. “For poor Mother, I apologize.” He favored Deorwen with a backward glance as he tramped inside. “She loves wh
en I call her ‘Mother,’ don’t you, Mother?”

  The old woman gave a wet grunt.

  “That’s love,” he said. “It’s all kisses and cuddles with us two!”

  Durand burned to know what they had seen of Almora, but he was loathe to trust such creatures as these even with the questions. He was the champion. If he described the duke’s daughter, they would know his errand. Durand snarled like the bondman’s cur.

  Servants hurried through the barn-like hall while the rustic lord ushered his guests to a stair on the plastered back wall. All through the hall, armed men were hitching themselves up on elbows, watching like long cats with still eyes. There were plenty of blades.

  “You must have a groom see to the horses,” murmured Durand.

  “I’ve got a good man,” said the country lord, but he was on to other business before they reached the top of the stair: “Wife. Here! Throw me a tunic and drawers. We’ve got bloody guests! And your mother’s been at them.”

  The man showed Durand a row of yellow teeth. “Has it been the choking on nightmares again? The choking on nightmares is an especial favorite of mine.”

  With a wincing shrug, the man led the bedraggled party to a door at the creaking top landing. In the lamplight was a bed and blankets. Handing the naked lord his breeches was a stout woman, just past her middle years, with a coverlet pulled to her chins.

  “In you come,” the man said. He jabbed one paw toward the bed. “Sit down. You too, Mother, why not? It’ll be nice and cozy, won’t it?”

  Deorwen followed the old woman to join the row on the edge of the bed, but Durand stopped on the threshold, and Ailric did not come even that far.

  “What brings you to the bedchamber of Lord Turold of Towerknoll in the midst of a moonless night, then, exactly, eh?”

  “Good evening, Lord Turold. The duke travels south,” Deorwen said, carefully omitting Almora’s escape.

  Towerknoll squinted at this, nodding along. “The duke. Aye. My reeve watched that crowd on the Acconel Road.” He found Durand in the gloom at the door. “I took it for a good sign—gave my man a skin of my best claret when he told me. He said there was a vanguard of Swanskin men up front, making good time. Do they mean to cross at Wrothsilver? Leovere’s Penseval is not far from Wrothsilver if memory serves, just over the river and up the hills. Is that what he’s up to, our old Coensar? Taking a few boys to knock on our Leovere’s door? Maybe ask him to settle down?”