The loader stepped up with a small paper bag and placed it in the muzzle. The rammer rammed it down sharply to where Duke had a placed a sharp spike into the touch hole. “Home,” he said. He withdrew the spike and then thrust it down savagely, piercing the powder bag, and then a boy stepped forward with a goose quill and popped it into the touch hole.
“Ready!” Duke said.
“Fire,” Edmund Chevins said.
Duke slapped the top of the goose quill with his slow match and the gonne fired with a loud, flat crack that echoed across the plain.
Du Corse turned and came back, the smoke billowing around him. “Bon Dieu,” he growled. “It is the end of war.”
“I doubt it,” Gabriel said. “But I suspect they’ll come as a little surprise to someone.” His smile was grim.
“I will want my own,” Du Corse said, with a smile at Payam. “If no castle can stand against these, then …” The Gallish knight left the rest unspoken.
But his second, d’Aubrichecourt, smiled wickedly. “No baron could ever stand against a king who had these,” he said.
Gabriel thought of castles, and of Du Corse. And frowned. “I didn’t think of that,” he said.
Later, as Ariosto was prepared for riding, he came across Mortirmir sitting cross-legged in the sunshine with a clay pot full of arrowheads before him, and then a line of a dozen blued-steel spearheads, heavy, lugged spearheads, on a blanket. Gabriel watched him for a while, as Anne laid his flying harness out on the ground.
There was no blaze of fire, nor was there a thunderclap. Just, finally, a little shimmer, as if his eyes had refocused. And now every weapon bore a small letter M in Imperial Gothic script under its maker’s mark.
“Fell spears,” Gabriel said in jest.
“Less metal. Much easier,” Mortirmir said. “Tom’s idea.”
Harndon—Lessa
Lessa moved quickly through the streets. They were relatively empty; people were afraid of the new plague, and the horned men and their sorcerous dances, or so it was said, and now there were royal guardsmen and trained band guilds people everywhere, on alert, in full armour; some street corners and larger market squares had apprentice magisters, or initiates of the Order of Saint Thomas.
She’d tried for two days to find anyone who’d seen these horned men and lived to tell about it; there had been at least three groups, and when they exploded, they showered every observer with a fine black dust that almost invariably brought death. There was a rumour that the queen had a counterspell; Tyler put it about that the queen didn’t see any need to share the cure with her subjects.
Despite the empty streets, or perhaps because of them, this time Lessa was better dressed, wearing men’s clothes: good hose that showed her legs, light boots like a soldier or a forester, and a loose gown that hid her gender and some other objects as well, under a fine hood that suggested she might be a person of quality, and topped with a fine red bycocket. At her side hung a short arming sword and a purse, and as she passed through Cheapside, men sometimes bowed and often cleared her way.
She was late, and annoyed to be late. The time for her assignation had passed with the chiming of the bells of the cathedral, and she worried that her man would simply walk away. But she’d been delayed by attentive guards and lines of suffering plague victims, and already Harndoners knew that when you saw one of the poor unfortunates, faces riddled with black marks like lettering on a page, you walked well around them, because they could burst and spread the black dust as horribly as the horned men. Or so it was said.
But several streets before the site of the meeting, deep in the tangle of alleys of the Scramble, she saw her mark, Captain Crowbeard, as Tyler had named him. She knew him instantly—his age, his erect back, and slightly bent neck, as if he’d spent his life trying to be slightly shorter than someone else. As she’d raised her status, he’d lowered his, and he wore a coarse wool gown, a matching hood, and loose hose held up by garters and bagged into heavier boots. Despite his low attire, he wore a long sword, but many did in the troubled times.
She thought of hailing him and realized what a foolish notion that was, and instead set herself to follow him. She pressed in closer. He paused to bargain with a pie man who was so thin he looked as if he needed to try some of his own wares. Crowbeard held out a pair of coppers and took a meat pie, and just then she brushed past him, laughing inside, and carried on down the narrow street.
After three strides she glanced back and saw his eyes light on her.
He gave a tenth of a smile and raised his meat pie in mock salute.
A hand reached out and seized his wrist.
The pie man was knocked flat by a thug, and every other man and woman on the street fled like pigeons before hawks, some shrieking, some silent.
The thug who dropped the pie man was big: tall and deep-chested, with a long blond beard.
The man who held her mark’s hand, pie and all, was the pimp of their first encounter. He backhanded Crowbeard, who spun away and fell across the pie man, limbs sprawling.
“That’s your protector, you bitch?” he asked. “You think I don’t know you in men’s clothes? I could get your nose slit for wearing men’s clothes, sweetie. I might just slit it myself.” He came toward her. “Bishop pays a reward for women caught in men’s clothes.”
She didn’t run. Nat Tyler needed the man on the ground and his “lord.” And this was what she trained for. The pimp scared her, though.
“You stuck me with a little knife?” he said. “I’ll …”
She drew. She didn’t have time to loosen the sword in the scabbard, and in her moment of fear, she forgot to get her left hand down to hold the throat of the scabbard, and so, for a heart-stopping moment, the scabbard’s wood and leather clung to the blade, and they came up together, but the narrow belts that bound the scabbard held, and the blade broke free.
Her draw, clumsy as it was, took the pimp by surprise, still moving forward, confident in the awe and fear he could cause, and the rising point caught him at the corner of his mouth, ripped out a tooth, and went up through his nose and stuck a moment in the ridge of bone in his brow before she passed back and got the blade free.
He grunted, slipped to one knee, and drew a heavy cutlass.
“You fucking bitch,” he said, except that a bit of his gum came out and he had to spit blood.
The big thug stepped forward and hefted a big oak club studded with nails.
“Shit,” Lessa said aloud. She knew that if she’d had her face opened by a blade, she’d be lying on the ground whimpering, or at least, she assumed she would. Not drawing a weapon and advancing. “Shit,” she said again.
She circled a little, keeping the big man behind the wounded one, and the pimp stood, swayed, and cut at her with his cutlass. It was an utterly incompetent blow; in one movement, he told her that he was no real threat, that he was untrained, a mere bravo, and weak from her first blow, and her heart soared. She flicked her little sword at his face; he overparried, and she cut his sword hand off his arm, just as Tyler had taught her, with a back cut from her rising sottano, her thumb pressed to the flat of her blade.
“Jesus fuck,” the pimp muttered. He fell to both knees in the street. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck!”
The wrist was still held together by a thread of gristle, and he was trying to hold his hand on. Blood fountained. She moved, watching the big man.
He was shaking his head, whistling between his teeth. “Bad business,” he said in a deep voice.
“Turn,” said Crowbeard, who’d gotten to his feet unnoticed in the last heartbeats.
The big man pivoted, a passable volte stabile that said he might be a tougher prospect than the man who’d hired him.
But he already had three feet of steel through his chest, and he died before he fell back off the long blade.
Kit Crowbeard leaned down and pulled the big man’s hood off his shoulder and used it to clean his long sword. Then he tossed it to Lessa, who caught it
fastidiously and used it to clean the blood off her own much shorter sword as if she killed men every day. She was charged with spirit; she wanted to sing, or shout aloud.
“I never like to stab a man in the back,” Crowbeard said conversationally. “I have done it, mind. But I don’t like it.”
Crowbeard sheathed his sword without looking, drew a small knife out of his big boots, and leaned over the pimp, who was still kneeling, whimpering, as he bled out. Lessa thought he was going to finish the man, but instead the older man cut the pimp’s purse free from its strap and opened it, casually leaning against a dirty white house wall.
“Help me,” the pimp said.
Crowbeard looked both ways on the street. “Thanks, by the way,” he said to Lessa. “Nice cut. Next time, use your hips and the hand will come right off like the head of a flower.” He popped open the purse, dumped the coins in the mud, looked inside.
“Help me! Please …” the pimp said. His voice already sounded weaker.
Crowbeard looked at the pimp. And grinned. And then looked back at Lessa. “Shall we?” he asked, pointing toward the inn where they were supposed to meet.
“He’ll …” she began.
“He’ll bleed out in a few minutes,” Crowbeard said with a terrible smile. “And then he’ll go to hell. Forever.” Crowbeard blew the pimp a kiss. “Come. We have a queen to kill.”
The pimp subsided gradually into the bloody mud of the street. The pie man got to his feet and searched the mud for the coins Crowbeard had dumped, and then ran off, leaving his pies; the other pickpockets, whores of both sexes, as well as the relatively honest tradesmen like the paper seller and the paste maker all stepped over the dying man and hurried on their various ways as he mumbled and burbled. Eventually his mouth filled with the slush and liquid manure of the street when an urchin shoved his face in the muck to shut him up.
Only then did he die.
By then, the pie man had found Ranald Lachlan. And Harmodius.
They might have paid him more attention if they hadn’t just had a tip about the attack of a trio of horned men in Aldgate Street. They ran, a dozen armoured guards at their backs and the filthy pie man trying to keep up. He caught them up at the ancient gate itself.
Three horned figures stood framed in the arch of the gate. They’d killed the guard, who lay at their feet.
Harmodius worked; the three horned men immolated inside shield bottles of worked ops and their spores burned with them.
But Harmodius missed the fourth and fifth, who were in the ramshackle house by the gate. Ranald caught the smaller—a rising cut from his scabbard far better executed than Lessa’s—and he used his hips and the horned man’s head rolled and bounced in the stone gutter. Spores poured out of the severed neck, a torrent of what should have been blood.
“Don’t breathe!” Harmodius roared. He cast; the last horned man unmade into a cloud of black spores, and the black cloud and the fire met. The spores burned with a sudden whoosh that left a vague smell of cooking mushrooms. A royal guardsman grabbed at his throat, choking; in a moment a black fleck appeared on his face.
The man shivered all over.
Ranald Lachlan stepped close like a lover and dug in his belt pouch, dropping his black-bloody sword in the street. He found the phial he wanted and pushed it between his man’s teeth, and the man’s rolling eyes focused and he swallowed.
Harmodius grabbed the man by the belt and cast, muttered an invocation that filled the air in letters of fire, and cast again.
He stumbled back, healed. And fainted.
He fell over the corpse of the pie man. The man’s face was already turning black. Lachlan caught his man’s arms and hauled him off, and Harmodius shielded the pie man’s still-warm corpse and burned it to ash, leaving a body-shaped patch of dried mud and ordure, backed hard, where the body had lain.
“What was he saying?” Lachlan said. “Poor bastard.”
“Plot to kill the queen,” Harmodius said.
“Ten a penny,” Lachlan said. “Fuck. Poor bastard.” He looked at Harmodius. “I need to wash.”
“I need to get out of here,” Harmodius said. He’d spent two days fighting the horned men; rushing from point to point, casting, healing, fighting. “This is all—”
“Vital?” Lachlan said bitterly. “I ken ye want to be up north.”
Harmodius was looking at the spot where the pie man had lain.
“This is all distraction,” he said.
The Cohocton—Bill Redmede
They moved quickly on moccasin-clad feet; no one had boots anymore. There was almost no light, but they were getting good at moving in low light and their handful of irks guided them expertly. Behind the Jacks and the foresters there were almost a hundred Alban militiamen, running softly with their crossbows on their shoulders. Ten days of near-constant combat had eroded the differences between veteran and novice. And behind them, a century of Moreans, all mountaineers.
Far to the west, something gave a great roar, and was answered. In the northeast, the light was turning orange over the peaks of the Adnacrags; in the west, the sky was an unnatural colour, at least for the heavens; more like slate than like a storm.
They ran on, lungs heaving.
An irk guide turned suddenly, and waved. Bill Redmede knew the ground immediately: a long marsh formed in the distant past by giant beaver. The giant beaver were long gone, but their smaller cousins had moved in. Even as his Jacks ran up behind him, a legion of autumn frogs leaped into the water, expecting predators; out in the orange-lit flat water to the north, a trout leapt, magnificent in its grace.
Redmede gave no order. He merely held his arms out, hands flat to the earth, and all the rangers spread out on either hand, Jacks to the left, foresters to the right, Albin militia and Moreans in the middle, as they had practiced and executed half a dozen times.
They had moved almost a dozen miles in one night—south of the old road, well south—and circled into the rear of Ash’s host.
Across the swamp, there was movement. A horn called, long and musical, and another answered.
Redmede blew a whistle. Off to his right, his brother’s whistle answered, and all around him, Alban militia began to span their crossbows. Farther left, Stern Rachel raised a heavy war bow and loosed a ranging arrow, and it flew, up and up, down and down, to strike across the swamp. Just to Redmede’s right, a short, squat Morean whirled a sling over his head and a stone flew out over the marshy pond and vanished in the weeds.
The autumn mosquitoes began to play among the waiting rangers. At first they came in ones and twos, and then in hordes. It was mostly a warm autumn, and the insects were fierce, and people began to curse in three languages.
Another roar, this one from the north—a fell beast. Horns, low and malignant, then high and piercing.
The light was growing in the sky.
Bill Redmede crouched, waiting, anxious. Worrying about everything.
A wyvern appeared, flying slowly, circling, off to the west, and then another.
Another pair of wyverns appeared from the east.
Redmede cursed.
Across the swamp, something crashed in the alder brake. Heads came up among the rangers. A militia woman clipped a bolt into her weapon, locking the nock against the heavy string. Her hands were shaking, and so were Redmede’s.
A Morean knelt with a crucifix in his hand.
Suddenly, the wyverns converged, three against two, their long, high screams filling the air, their movements almost too fast to track. At the merge there was a melee, lasting less than two heartbeats, and then there were four wyverns, two and two, and the fifth falling, falling, one wing torn away, screaming, fluttering, screaming, and hitting the ground deep in the woods a mile to the north.
An irk knight broke cover, his stag labouring in the mud at the edge of the swamp, and then the noble beast gathered itself and leapt into the deep water, sank, and then emerged, swimming strongly.
Another irk appeared, an
d then Redmede could see Syr Ydrik, on the far shore, directing his retreat. Sorcery flashed; the irk knight’s glowing green castle held, and suddenly the irk captain’s great white stag turned and dropped into the water. There were dozens of irk knights in the water now; then there were hundreds, swimming for their lives, their surefooted, broad-hooved mounts keeping them alive.
Close behind them came the hastenoch and a vast tribe of giant Rukh; perhaps as many as fifty. A pair of purple-crested warden shamans directed them, casting and casting, and then the hastenochs broke free of the alder and pelted into the water, followed by the Rukh, who came on slowly, ripping each great foot from the ooze and placing it again.
Redmede’s nerves were gone. He stood, looked left and right, and put his whistle to his lips.
No one needed an invitation. All the rangers scrambled to their feet.
He took a breath and blew.
Four hundred bows wobbled, pointed almost at the sky. Four hundred backs heaved. Four hundred steel points steadied.
“Loose!” roared the forester master archer, John Hand.
The irks were still swimming; their pursuit was too close for the crossbows to shoot over them, but the Moreans, well spread out, began to cast. Their sling stones were lead and weighed more than a war bow arrow.
Redmede held his hand flat. “Bide!” he called to the militia.
The bows were already coming up again.
“Loose,” called Hand.
The arrows made a noise in the silent morning, like the sound of doves rustling and cooing in an old barn. The sling stones hissed.
A Rukh woman, up to her waist in water, stopped walking and put a hand to her eye, where an arrow had sprouted. She plucked at it, and it came out. Half a dozen sling stones hit her all together, and she belly flopped forward into the water, dead.
The arrows fell like steel sleet. The sling stones fell almost as fast.
The irks were still swimming. They were close now, and the archers loosed one more, high, and then fell flat. The tired stags powered up the muddy banks of the swampy pond and carried on through the prone men and women, and never stepped on a one. The last dozen irks were slow; tired, or perhaps wounded, they took too long; Redmede found himself calling out to one slight, fanged irk woman, like a man coaxing the best out of a runner in a race.