The man grunted and staggered, his legs going weak. He didn’t fall, though, as Bransen whirled about, a long-flying left hook chopping the man across the jaw. That blow, too, would have knocked him sidelong to the ground, except that Bransen needed this man upright. He caught him firmly, lined him up, and drove forward with all his strength toward the archer.
After a couple of strides the dazed man started to resist, but holding him in both hands by the leather jerkin, Bransen jerked his arms out straight, then yanked them back in as he lowered his forehead and snapped his head forward.
The crackling sound and gush of blood showed this one’s nose to be broken. Again Bransen bulled him across the hilltop at the archer.
The Highwayman recognized that he didn’t have the time to reach the bowman, for the two behind him weren’t out of the fight quite yet. As he neared the central fire, Bransen threw the man backward. He clipped the logs and fell over, still a few feet short of the archer. Bransen went down low, almost to all fours, cleverly scooping a stone. He came up straight again and looked at his foe’s leveled bow.
“You have only one shot, of course,” Bransen said and smiled and began to walk steadily at the bowman. “Perhaps you will kill me, though I think that unlikely.”
He could see the man trying to steady his hands, clearly unnerved by the ease with which Bransen had just dispatched his three companions—and after Bransen had used his arm to deflect the first arrow away and had dodged the second with his back to the bow!
Smiling, mocking the man with a chuckle, Bransen hopped left, hopped right, and threw the rock.
The bowman cried out and let fly, but he was ducking as he did, thinking more about turning to run away than anything else. Still, his shot came dangerously close, whipping past barely a finger’s breadth from Bransen’s head.
He was too close, the arrow too fast. He never could have blocked that shot, and it occurred to Bransen that he had just come an inch from death.
No matter. The archer was fleeing. The man he had head-butted writhed on the ground and seemed none too eager to try to get up anytime soon. Bransen turned.
That left only two.
The swordsman swayed as he stood there, his face bloody, his eyes already swelling from the brutal punch. The club wielder held his weapon in his left hand, the shattered fingers of his right hand tucked in tight against his side.
“Is this a dance you truly desire?” Bransen asked.
“Who are you?” the swordsman asked.
“I already told you.”
“Why are you here?”
“Curiosity and disgust.”
“Disgust?” asked the man with the club. “Have ye seen our homes? Have ye seen me kids, then, eight o’ them, trampled dead under the spinning wheels of a chariot?”
Bransen had no answer to that. He lowered his eyes for a heartbeat and replied quietly, “I will go my way.” Then he looked up and added in a much more sinister tone, “And if you try to stop me again or if I see you mistreating your own again like the dogs of war, I will kill you.”
He was about to add that any who wanted to go with him would be welcome, but before he could speak he found himself reacting to a barrage of stones and sticks. He turned and blocked the most dangerous missiles, his eyes widening as he noted the charge.
The charge of children with sticks, some aflame, in hand. The charge of battered women, including the one who had been attacked behind the log. She came on most ferociously of all, throwing herself at Bransen, clawing at the air like a feral, rabid beast when he dodged aside. The look on her face, an expression locked in absolute denial, unsettled Bransen most of all.
A few stones hit him, though nothing serious, and the swordsman and club wielder hesitated, more than willing to let the children and the women begin the fight.
But it was no fight Bransen could accept. He darted for the side of the hill, catching the awkward swing of a youngster’s stick. He shoved the child to the side as he sprinted past just to get clear of him. Bransen reached the lip of the hill, more stones and sticks following his every step, and he leaped and fell into himself, into his ki-chi-kree, mimicking the magic of the malachite gemstone. He flew, he floated, he leaped far into the darkness, out from the hill at such a height that he caught the branches of the trees below and half pulled, half ran along those intertwined elevated walkways.
By the time he dared stop, by the time he had ended the enhanced magical trance, the campfire in the hillock was a distant speck of light, the continued shouted protests a distant din. The troubled young man sat back against the tree trunk, shifting so that his vantage point gave him a clear view of the starry sky. He tried to digest what he had just seen, tried to play past the incongruity of the battered woman coming at him with such primal hatred and violence. He replayed what he had seen on the hillock and affirmed to himself that he had not witnessed it in the wrong light. She had been taken against her will and beaten into submission—of that, there could be no doubt.
Were these people so desperate, so out of sorts, that such behavior had become acceptable to them? Was their loss so profound to their sensibilities that any semblance of order, even if it was order under the stamp of a heavy and painful boot, brought a measure of security and comfort?
Bransen could hardly comprehend the reasoning behind it, but he quickly came to understand the reality of what he had seen: the ultimate breakdown of civilization itself. This was the result of war, taken to the extreme, the desperate and forced primitive order out of inflicted chaos and agony. This was the result of utter helplessness in the wake of complete loss.
He tried to sort it out, conjuring past experiences and knowledge. He thought of the Book of Jhest, with passages describing such atrocities. He thought of his own life in war. Towns in Vanguard had been similarly razed by the hordes inspired by Ancient Badden, but never had he seen anything akin to this!
The difference in Vanguard had been the faith the survivors held in Dame Gwydre and the other nobles. Even when all had been lost except life itself, those people in Vanguard knew that their larger constructs of society, the dame and her court, the Order of Abelle, remained and would be there to shelter them and to feed them and to help them build anew. The people on this southern hillock had no such comfort. To whom would they turn? Yeslnik had done this, but his foe, Ethelbert, to whom they had pledged fealty, could not come forth, could not protect them. Did he even wish to?
These people had lost many of their loved ones and their very way of life. Because of the scorched earth and utter ruin, because of the absence of hope itself, they saw no way to reclaim it. As brutal as those four men leading the clan had been, they were the only measure of security and stability those poor folk on the hillock could hope to know. They were darkness, to be sure, but they were also the guides through the darkness, however wretched.
The young warrior knew that he could go back and kill those four and perhaps convince the others to then follow him. He could take them to Pryd, or even to Ethelbert.
He stared up at the stars and he shook his head at the helpless futility of it all.
He slept there, up in the tree, exhausted from his ordeal and from, most of all, the emotional battering he had taken in the shock of the cruel reality.
He awoke before the dawn, thinking to go straight off to the north to Pryd Town. Instead, Bransen went along the foothills of the Belt-and-Buckle. He avoided the hill where he had fought, but he looked for other clans. He found many of them scattered among the hills, desperate people living in caves or under overhangs or atop hillocks that provided them a defensive position. Bransen didn’t get close to any, the bitter experience fresh in his thoughts, but he viewed them from the nearest vantage points, one after another, throughout the rest of that day. He ended by climbing as high as he could among the nearby mountains, a clear perch to widen the view below him.
Dozens and dozens of campfires dotted the night terrain, one or two at a time, mostly, but with one congregation o
f more than a score.
Bransen marked that spot and went there before the dawn.
He found the same situation as he had witnessed on the hillock, only many times larger in scale. This was the prime clan of the region, it seemed, with no fewer than fifteen armed bosses, men and women alike, brutalizing and commanding many others, young and old and infirm.
Soon after he left that complex of rudimentary dwellings built under the overhangs of red-rocked cliffs, Bransen came across the scene of a recent battle—probably one between the clan he had just left and a lesser group that had happened upon them.
Crows picked at the bodies scattered in the region, which included a few who might have fought back and a few more, very old, who would have no doubt been helpless in the face of the assault. There were no children to be found, however, except for the body of a single young girl. Bransen glanced back at the large clan and wondered how many among the children he had seen there were recent acquisitions.
The troubled young man did not sleep in that devastated region that night. He couldn’t sleep. So he walked back out to the road and to the northern fork that would lead him to Pryd Town, and north beyond that, he hoped, to Chapel Abelle and Cadayle.
FIVE
Visions of Graveyards
“Not as secure as you insisted,” King Yeslnik scolded Laird Panlamaris when the truth of the murderous night became evident across the city.
“What do ye know of powries?” the laird asked flatly.
Yeslnik stared at him for daring to so challenge the throne. Indeed, all about the pair, men and women of both courts shuffled nervously.
“You ever fight one?” Panlamaris went on, not backing down an inch. His voice grew thick, his accent flowing in and out like a master bard scaring a group of children about the bonfire with tales of goblins and ghouls. “You ever stick your sword into one’s gut, tearing out its innards and thinking your battle done, only to have the beast laugh at ye and leap on ye?”
Yeslnik started to scold him but wound up merely swallowing hard.
“Aye, but it’s a dactyl demon itself the witch Gwydre’s put upon my city and upon us all,” he said, standing up straight and casting his gaze all about the room. “Don’t you doubt it, King Yeslnik. The powries are more than Palmaristown’s problem.”
He kept glancing away to the east as he spoke, toward Dame Gwydre’s chapel prison. His thoughts turned to a vision of a charge against those walls, when at last they would be breached, when Dame Gwydre would kneel before him, begging for mercy.
“And what will you do about our problem?” King Yeslnik said—again, Laird Panlamaris realized when he turned his attention back to his present surroundings.
“Your city has a most important guest, the king himself,” Yeslnik said. “And you allow these beasts to crawl in at night and cause such mischief?”
“No warships in port this night,” Panlamaris said. “The powries come from the river, and so the river will be watched.”
“See to it that they do not return until my own ship is long gone from your wharf.”
“Aye, my king,” the laird repeated absently, for his thoughts were again on Gwydre, kneeling before him, crying and begging until the moment he took her head from her shoulders.
They called it Sepulcher. To the powries this was procreation, and for hundreds of years it had been the only means of continuing their race. Mcwigik and Bikelbrin and the others took the hearts of their fallen comrades and buried them, then danced their magical movements and sang their songs invoking the healing powers of the world to breathe life into those hearts anew. In a matter of weeks a new powrie would emerge from the shallow graves, small at first but fast to grow into the image of the one who had provided the heart.
Mcwigik led the songs, the first of which spoke of times long past when the bloody-cap dwarves dominated Corona. Numbering in the millions, their kingdoms ruled supreme in every land from Behr to Alpinador and on the islands across the great Mirianic. Even those places now considered wilderness, like this very region across the Masur Delaval had been, according to powrie lore, once tamed under the armies of the dwarves.
But Sepulcher, for all of its rejuvenating magic, was a practice of inevitable decline; any dwarf lost whose heart could not be reclaimed could not be replaced. What’s more, Sepulcher produced only male powries; even a female dwarf heart would yield a male child, one that looked much like its predecessor but was undeniably male. The dwarves had never been prolific breeders in the traditional sense, and, alas, there remained no female powries to be found in any event.
This was the lament of the songs as the dwarves, locked in a huddle, arms across each other’s shoulders, moved to the second act of their ritual. The lament drifted to the recitation of heroic feats of heart retrieval, mostly at sea, as the determined dwarves steadfastly refused to let their race pass from the world. Among the powries no heroes stood taller than those who would dive into the cold waters to secure the lines to a sunken barrelboat and her lost crew.
The final act was a call to the powrie gods to grant a woman from the Sepulcher and was followed by the melodic and droning song of the warrior, the final, resigned acceptance.
Put me deep in the groun’ so cold
I’ll be dead ’fore I e’er get old
Done me fights and shined me cap
Now’s me time for th’endless nap
Spill no tear and put me deep
Dun want no noise for me endless sleep
Done me part and stood me groun’
But th’other one won and knocked me down
Put me deep in the groun’ so cold
I’ll be dead ’fore I e’er get old
Spill no tear and put me deep
Dun want no noise for me endless sleep
“Aye, but they’re coming,” Captain Shiknickel informed the singers, and all eyes turned to the wide river. In an ultimate act of defiance, the powries had decided to create their mass Sepulcher directly across the river from Palmaristown on the western bank of the Masur Delaval and in full view of the city lights across the way.
“They’ll find our boys,” one dwarf lamented.
“Nah, but the dopes ain’t for knowin’ nothing about Sepulcher,” Mcwigik replied.
“Yach, but what’s yerself knowing about what they’re knowing?” the other asked. “Ye been on a damned island for a hundred years!”
“I’m knowing that if they knew, they’d’ve cut the hearts after staking our boys. Cut ’em and burned ’em, and we’d be down a fair number o’ dwarves.”
“Aye,” many others agreed, including Shiknickel.
“Mess it all up, then, and no cairns,” reasoned Bikelbrin. “If they’re not knowing that we buried something here, they’ll not be looking.”
“Summer’s on, ground’s soft,” a different dwarf warned. “Not hard to see that the ground’s been turned.”
Bikelbrin grinned wickedly and looked to Mcwigik, and then the two of them turned to Shiknickel.
The dwarf captain laughed. “So we buried our waste, eh?” he remarked. “Dig them holes back halfway to the hearts. Had a hearty dinner meself. . . .”
That was all he needed to say. The dwarves excavated two feet of dirt. As was customary in Sepulcher, the hearts were down twice that. The dwarves did their business, laying a layer of shite into the holes once they were opened. They then filled the holes, scraped the ground, and tossed stones and branches about haphazardly.
“As fitting a cairn as any powrie’d e’er want,” a satisfied Mcwigik announced.
“Boats ain’t far. Arrows’ll be flying in soon,” a dwarf near the water warned.
The powries retreated up the riverbank to the north, where they had beached their barrelboats. They didn’t immediately climb aboard and put back out, though, for the sailing ships didn’t hang around on that side of the river for long. The dark of night favored the powries, who could see the silhouette of sails clearly enough against the starry canopy, while their
barrelboats would be almost completely invisible to sailors on Palmaristown ships.
More than one of Shiknickel’s boys pointed that out as they watched from a rocky point. They were hungry for revenge and eager to ram a few warships after burying the hearts of their fallen.
Shiknickel held them back. “Boats’re already out, pedaling across the gulf,” he reminded them. “Our boys’ll be paid back in full order, and soon enough, when all the boats o’ the isles come forth. Oh, but there’s human blood to be spillin’, don’t ye doubt, and I’m tellin’ me own shiver to know that they’re killing more than any others.”
The cheer was muted out of necessity, but there was no missing the enthusiasm from the powries at the proclamation. The Palmaristown stakes had gone too far; the folk of Honce, though they didn’t really appreciate it yet, had declared war on the powries.
And to a one, the ferocious dwarves were more than happy to oblige.
You do wrong by me, King Yeslnik,” Father De Guilbe protested at a private meeting between himself and the ruling couple. “To associate me with Artolivan and his ilk insults me profoundly.”
“I have done you wrong?” Yeslnik replied, dramatically placing his open hand over his chest and setting the timbre of his voice to express surprise and injury, and, on a subtle level, a measure of a threat. Clearly, he was calling for De Guilbe to recant, but the priest, a veteran of battle and policy, a huge brute of a man who never shied from a fight and never spoke anything less than that which was on his mind, smiled and nodded.