Percy turned to her. “Good morning, My Lady—”
“It is a foul morning. Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Your fearsome knave, paramour—whatever you would have me call it—the Black Knight! He is wanted by the Duke in the main tent, for they are discussing last minute field assignments—”
“He is tending his warhorse, Jack, right over there—”
Suddenly there were screams coming from beyond the trees to the south. Screams, followed by running men, women and children, and harsh cries of soldiers, and the clanging of steel . . . and the beat of approaching drums.
“Trovadii! We have been seen! They are coming!”
Lady Jelavie whirled around and drew steel. She held a long powerful sword in both hands, balancing with her feet in the snow, and took a graceful step forward to shield Percy.
“To Arms! To Arms!” the cries of Goraque sergeants and commanders echoed throughout the campsite. “Goraque, to Arms!”
There were flashes of pomegranate red up ahead, and bristling long pikes moving relentlessly forward.
Percy stood in place, staring. She saw the running women and the ground churning underneath their feet, the crawling dead. . . .
In the next instant, Beltain was there, his own great sword drawn, and Jack on a lead behind him.
“Percy!” he exclaimed, and then seeing her safe, his face showed relief. Seeing the Lady San Quellenne with her sword bared, he gave her a quick nod of gratitude.
“The Duke wanted to see you . . . in the war tent, My Lord!” Jelavie blurted. “But now, now it matters no longer, for the fight is upon us!”
“Mount up!” Beltain exclaimed, and in the next moment he was in the saddle, and then pulling up Percy before him.
Lady Jelavie nodded, then ran for her own grey warhorse a few feet away. She flew up into the saddle with the lightness of an experienced rider, and then she was away toward the Tanathe fires to assist her people.
Percy was squeezed against Beltain’s chest, and he was hastily moving his vambrace-clad arms, adjusting his armor plates and pulling his shield up, while the flashes of red in the sparse trees drew nearer.
“Percy, hang on . . . yes, hold your hands here on the armor rings—”
And then they were galloping.
“Fall back!” A small group of Goraque knights, about half a dozen, came bursting through past a snowy rise, from the other side of the camp, kicking up snow, and then one warhorse stumbled, screaming, almost falling over the moving limbs of the dead that emerged from the snow. The knight hung on, but just barely. . . .
Percy reached out with her death sense, and the forest rang in her mind, and everything was familiar tolling darkness. She could feel them, individual deaths of the oncoming Trovadii, and the ones crawling underneath the snow.
She plucked them, like strings, testing them, in the vicinity of about thirty feet around them. And then a thought came to her—now would be a good time to try the act of granting death, only accompanied with the vision of white light and the White Bridegroom. Indeed, why did she not think of it before? Here was a chance to test her ability to do it correctly, before she tried it upon the Cobweb Bride. . . .
Percy reached for a random dead man, a foot soldier wearing the red of blood, and she took his death shadow, and as she guided it into his corpse she visualized Lord Death in blinding white—
There was a strange retinal flash in her own vision, and for a moment Percy was blinded, both physically and on the inside, in her death sense.
It flared and sputtered, and instead of putting the dead man to his final rest, he was released from her mind’s grasp like a wooden puppet and then continued exactly as he was, moving forward in formation, holding his long heavy pike before him. . . .
It was not working!
Percy’s heart began to pound in her temples.
Beltain noticed her intent stare, noticed there was something wrong, because she almost ceased breathing.
“Are you all right? What happened?” he spoke in her ear, while directing Jack over craggy areas covered with snow and shrubbery.
“I—” Percy could not speak.
People in the camp were running, foot soldiers and villagers, and dogs scrambling from underfoot, away from the great warhorse. A woman holding up her old mother stumbled, and was lifted up by two Goraque infantrymen, and then they pushed past the women, onward.
Beltain carefully circled back about a hundred feet, taking them to the original place they had camped, and just in time, for the Count D’Arvu and his family were in danger from an approaching tight formation of the enemy.
“What now?” Percy managed to speak, her head reeling. “Oh, Beltain, we need to make sure of Leonora’s safety! Nothing must happen to her, not until I can put her to rest properly! She must not be harmed!”
And then she blurted out to him the rest of what had happened at Death’s Keep, and how Death was too week to do the deed and it was up to her.
Beltain listened grimly then nodded, saying, “Fear not, we’ll look after her. . . .”
He stopped Jack before the Count and Countess and Leonora, who were huddled together with their servants and a small group of the San Quellenne.
“Set me down . . .” whispered Percy. “I’ll only be in your way as you fight.”
“But I cannot protect you if you—”
“Set me down, Beltain! I’ll protect them my own way, and I’ll protect you also!”
“Damn it to Hell!” Beltain exhaled in grim intensity. And then he looked at Percy with a hard impossible gaze, and he gently helped her down from the saddle.
“Be careful! Stay together, all of you! Do not move from this spot!” His baritone rang, and he turned to face the oncoming Trovadii.
Percy stumbled slightly in the snow, then came to stand before Leonora and her parents, and she gave them a brief reassuring smile. “The Black Knight has never been beaten in battle . . .” she said. “He will protect us all!”
While I will protect him. . . .
Count Lecrant was not a fighting man, but he drew out a short gentleman’s sword. “If it comes to it, I will try to do my best to protect you also.”
But Percy was barely listening. She tentatively reached out with her death sense, for she could feel them all around, encroaching, the thousands upon thousands and more beyond the trees. She had to make sure she still had the means to do what had to be done, with or without the white light searing her mind.
A dead man’s arm burst through the snow directly at their feet, and Lady Arabella stifled a cry.
Percy reached for him in her old way, and she easily plucked the death shadow and stuffed it into the cold dead flesh.
The dead man ceased moving, was a cold lifeless thing.
But in that same instant she felt someone reach out to her from a distance, in the same manner as she reached out to the dead.
Only this was a living touch, and one she had known once before.
Persephone!
The dark Goddess was inside her mind.
All morning and afternoon Letheburg was besieged by the forces of winter, heavy relentless storm winds and overcast dark grey skies—although it was notably odd that the cold had lessened almost overnight, and the snow started melting all along the rooftops, clinging impossibly to all surfaces despite the gale force wind blowing upon it. . . .
Whatever it was, King Roland Osenni of Lethe had had quite enough.
After what had transpired on the battlements, and the other impossible strange events still happening below—massing armies, goddesses out of classical mythology, flashes of lighting, light-radiating golden figures, darkness-exuding shadowed figures, inexplicable elemental weather patterns and—and, oh yes indeed, the revelation of that flibbertigibbet and meddler Grial as the Goddess Hecate, followed by his own magical ascension up into the air like one of the blessed angels—His Majesty swiftly ordered his guards to get him “as far away as possible from the unnatu
ral sorcery and madness” as he called it.
Thus he hastily left the large bulwark where he had seen Grial, or, blast her, Hecate, create two new deities out of the Infanta of the Realm and that infernal marquis who had killed her and now followed her around like a lovelorn hound—for yes, the King had his suspicions in that direction. . . . And then the two of them, all sparkling white and very much immortal, disappeared somewhere, while Grial—that is, Hecate—gave the King a nod and told him to have a lovely afternoon, and then disappeared also. . . .
King Roland Osenni moved carefully along the parapet walkway, keeping to the inside of the safety barrier, and was about to start his careful descent from the walls along the snowed-over slippery stairs (with a guard directly behind and two in front in case he fell) when a strange deep rumble sounded for leagues around.
The deep bass sound was so low that it felt as if a mountain had scraped its foundation against rock and had shifted and settled into a new location. It sent up black specks of winter birds screaming up into the skies.
At the same time, the heavens overhead—late afternoon, but already as dark as evening—seemed to reflect the passing of a great sky-sized shadow sweeping across its cloud-covered sphere. For a few moments the layers of storm cloud thick as cotton shimmered with an unnatural chromatic iridescence, and then it was gone.
Alarmed exclamations of patrolling soldiers resounded all around the battlements.
“Your Majesty!” One of his captains was on the top of the stair, and he was pointing outside the walls. “Wait, Your Majesty! You might want to see this!”
The King grunted, and then turned around with a sinking feeling in his gut, and started back up the few slippery stairs that he had descended. A soldier offered him the spyglass, and the King was assisted onto another raised spot on the walkway that was higher up, so that he could look out without crossing the magical safety barrier in the middle. “What is it that I am looking at? What was that horrendous sound?”
But he peered through the telescope lens, and he stopped breathing.
Beyond the outer walls of Letheburg, where moments ago had been a plain covered with Trovadii pomegranate color and endless enemy army formations unto the horizon, only about two hundred feet away now hulked a strange massive shape cast in shadow, vaguely granite or possibly cream-yellow chalk slate. It resembled a mountain in the mist, a mountain with its top flattened or cut off to form a plateau, which—as he swept the spyglass across—seemed to have strange regular man-made demarcations on the top, that very much resembled crenels and merlons of a great city bulwark and battlements similar to those of Letheburg itself. . . .
Roland Osenni’s mind attempted to process the sensory information that his eyes provided, but frankly it was incomprehensible. “What is it?” he muttered. “That thing! What is it that I see? A mirage? A reflection of our own walls? Would someone tell me what is out there? And where did it come from?” His voice ended in a yell.
A soldier nearby, also peering through a spyglass, said, “This is very hard to believe, Your Majesty, but I think that’s the actual outer walls of the citadel at Silver Court. I recognize the shape of the parapets and beyond it some of the interior landmarks in the distance. . . . There’s the dome of the Basilica Dei Coello—”
“What?” the King roared. “Are you telling me that’s Silver Court out there? That His Imperial Majesty’s Silver Court is sitting right outside the walls of Letheburg, together with our blessed Emperor of the Realm?”
“It appears so, Your Majesty.”
“What in Hell or Heaven is going on? How? How did it get here?”
“Well, Majesty, considering that the city streets and other parts of the world have been disappearing everywhere, maybe the land between here and there has simply . . . faded away.”
The King set down the spyglass, then turned around, and climbed back down from the raised part of the walls. “All right. Put an additional patrol on watch duty, and observe this—whatever the hell it is,” he muttered. “Meanwhile, I need to go lie down for a while and think. . . . And have a few glasses of brandy and whisky and maybe top it off with cream liqueur, and then maybe whatever in blazes the Palace cooks have made for supper.” He started walking back down the parapet stairs again. Then added loudly, without turning, “But do keep me informed. If anything else happens.”
The peculiar lukewarm storm winter winds continued blowing through Letheburg well into the evening and night, interrupted at some point by a soft lovely snowfall, then resumed again. And then, about four hours after midnight and very close to dawn, another horrific grating noise was heard, and this time it felt like an earthquake had quaked the firmament and the ground all around the city. Or possibly, it felt as if a very large object collided with Letheburg.
It was unclear what had happened, but the source of the disturbance came from the direction of the southern walls. Garrison soldiers ran to investigate and report back, but in the ensuing confusion they were distracted by yet a second horrendous noise, a true sonic boom, that not only quaked the earth for leagues all around, but seemed to have originated slightly southeast of the city walls.
In the windy darkness of the night, spyglasses were nearly useless, but they were trained in all directions nevertheless, by ranking officers, while frantically confused soldiers stood ready with bared blades, muskets, pikes, tar and pitch and torches ready to be lit, and whatever else was at hand.
After straining their telescopes into the darkness, they noticed small flickering lights of torches a few hundred feet away, strung out across horizontally like beads on a necklace. And as the thick cloud cover was unrelieved, it was impossible to verify whether or not another large hulking shape had grown out of nowhere just outside the walls.
“Ahoy there!” someone from the Letheburg battlements finally cried out.
“Ahoy yourself!” came from about a hundred feet away. “Identify yourselves!”
“You identify yourselves, villain! Are ye dead men?”
“Do I sound like a dead man, sirrah?” came from the south.
“How the hell different does a dead man sound?”
Across the black expanse of night, pinpoints of lights that were distant torches flickered, at approximate eye-level of the soldiers on top of the city walls. The lights seemed to be spread in dots all across the south and southeast, suggesting other walls where earlier in the day there had been only sky.
“Well?” the Letheburg soldier persisted. “Answer now, ye flaming whoreson!”
“I bite my thumb at you!” came from the south.
“What foul-mouthed magic is this?” came another voice, even more distant, this one about a hundred-fifty feet away from the southwest. “Who are you people?”
But before anyone could reply, in the pre-dawn murk, another terrifying scrape and boom sounded, and this time the walls of Letheburg shook from the impact.
Patrol soldiers up on the battlements witnessed an unbelievable moment of translucence and dissolution along a portion of the parapets walkway for about thirty feet, as the walkway was swept away from under their feet—and a few misfortunate men stumbled and fell, both from the outer and inner walls like tiny toy soldiers. And then, as they rushed back from the place that was collapsing, dissolving, in the same spot they saw new walls rise—walls a few feet taller than the level of the Letheburg parapets—and these were wrought of a different kind of stone.
There was a godawful scrape, as the strange walls wedged themselves in a circular manner into the break of the Letheburg walls, settling with a deep rumble, sending up snow powder raining from all the tops of the nearby merlons.
And then there was abysmal silence.
Soldiers wearing the cobalt blue uniforms of Letheburg stared up in horrified disbelief, as just a few feet before them, along the newly formed section of wall, a patrol of Silver Court guards wearing the Imperial black and silver with a fine trim of red and gold pointed muzzles of their muskets directly down at them.
/> But that was not the worst of it.
“The safety barrier!” a Letheburg soldier cried, as several lurching dead figures moved in at him from the outside walls, unhindered by any protective wards of sorcery. “It appears to be gone!”
Percy felt the dark Goddess Persephone inside her mind. It was an intimate touch that held the innermost part of her like a vulnerable living marionette, within the cruel hand of the Goddess. The thing that held her was a terrible dark intelligence.
You are mine.
What will you do now, mortal girl child?
Percy knew pressure, overwhelming, stifling, followed by a burst of panic. Her spirit struggled, for the psychic touch surrounding her was full of numbing cold and grating corrosion and there was an even deeper layer of pain beyond, and its color was pitch-black. . . .
Indeed, pain was her domain—pain strung along a continuum leading to dark pleasure—and deeper yet, empty hollow silence within walls of sociopath logic and hard soulless reason. No mercy or compassion. . . . No awe or wonder.
Negation of all.
The Goddess was the sickness of grief interspersed with fury at something inexplicable. She was hatred and disdain for all else that was not herself.
“I am not yours!” Percy cried in the desperate quicksand of her mind, feeling herself choking on the claustrophobic oppression pressing in around her . . . and suddenly she was falling deep. . . .
It was completely unlike Lord Death’s serene grey place that was separate unto itself. This was not a separate realm but a translucent layer of internal corruption superimposed upon her present field of vision—shadow detritus, tangled, twisted threads turning aimlessly upon themselves in futility, and filaments of befouled silk.
Cobwebs of despair. . . .
Percy had not been transported into another place. Rather, she was still present in the mortal world—standing in the snow-covered forest in the middle of the Goraque camp and surrounded by the chaos of the Trovadii attack.