A third red dart struck M’bub Ali’s amulet, and it burst. He grunted and drew a long knife.
Brown was already moving for the cottage wall.
A figure of flame came to the door; the mamluk, Ali-Mohamed, all his cotton clothes alight; he didn’t scream from the pain, and his lacquered bow loosed an arrow that struck M’bub Ali in the body and stuck in his ribs.
Brown didn’t question that the big mamluk was still fighting. He shot with his ballestrino from three strides out, and the burning man was hit and seemed to burst, scattering burning tatters of man everywhere.
Brown dropped his precious weapon in the mud and threw himself against the wall as flames roared out of the door and another figure emerged, also afire. Lucca hit it with something, perhaps hermetically summoned water; M’bub Ali’s saber severed a reaching hand in one blow, and Brown was rolling around the corner. Everything in his head was screaming that this was a deception; the flaming men at the back were covering something at the front.
He made it to the corner and threw himself flat in the mud, to look around the corner at ankle height.
There was a corpse in front of the door, lying headless in the rain. The fire was not as strong at the front of the house; Brown rolled back, trying to sort what he had just seen.
The front door was open.
Brown made himself go around the corner. He knew he couldn’t delay; he was already afraid for the horses and the woman.
Smoke poured from the low windows. Any moment, the front rooms would ignite.
He kept going.
Something was moving, very rapidly, in the gorse of the hillside. Something that seemed to smoke as it moved, and held a long sword in a clawed hand.
Brown cursed; he’d dropped his only ranged weapon; he had no idea where Lucca was.
He paused and knelt by the corpse.
The body wore a silk robe and there was a heavy gold cross on a solid gold chain twisted around the neck and hanging down the back. There was an incredible amount of blood, as if the man had exploded, and the head …
Brown heard the scream from below on the hillside and paused only to curse.
Lucca staggered around the corner of the cottage.
“No fucking idea,” spat Brown. “Someone has to cover the cottage. There could be more.”
He turned and ran down the hill.
Long Paw saw the bursts of red light, and then the cottage caught fire; a flash of light in the grey, and then smoke. Smoke out the front door …
Something moved on the hillside. The rain was tapering off; he could see the mountain peak beyond the cottage and the flash of a weapon reflecting light.
The truly abnormal is easy to see. It doesn’t match the patterns that people build so carefully in their minds; it is alien. The thing he saw was wrong: the size of a small deer or a large dog, dark red or black, moving at speed through the gorse. It was not like anything he’d ever seen.
He dropped back into the olive grove.
“Move away from the wall,” he shouted at Donna Beatrice, and when she didn’t respond, he caught her wrist and pulled her along until they were in among the horses. Long Paw watched their heads come up.
“That’s right, ladies,” he said aloud. “Something wicked. Just give it a kick, eh?” He drew his sword and took his buckler off his hip.
“Stay close,” he said in his best Etruscan.
The woman whimpered.
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said quietly.
The horses were spooked, right enough. Every head was up; eyes were rolling, and tails lashing.
Something red-black flashed over the wall.
M’bub Ali’s stallion screamed and reared.
And then the thing came over the back of the horses. Long Paw had time to be afraid; the face like a suckerfish, the body too thin to be real.
It had talons as long as daggers, wicked as stilettos, and a long, glowing sword in its right hand.
Brown’s mare kicked at it; one of M’bub’s horses landed a bite and slowed it.
Long Paw’s blade dropped under his buckler, and his left foot slid forward.
As it crossed the back of the horses, it went from saddle to saddle, and the horses panicked, and where it stepped on a bare back, the talons ripped flesh from the packhorse, but the stallion and two of the mares stood their ground.
Long Paw watched it for a little more than one beat of his heart. And then it was all training.
It was so fast that Long Paw had to start his rising cut, left to right, while the thing was still coming over the back of the last mare, four paces away.
The red-black thing loosed a scarlet bolt as it leapt. The steel and wood buckler in Long Paw’s left hand took the bolt, and became slag, and heat burned Long Paw’s hand right through the steel gauntlet under the buckler, burning two fingers off his hand and scorching the rest.
His cut severed a reaching, taloned hand and his point went unerringly into the thing’s sucker face even as its sword cut the last four inches off his own … a late parry with a magical sword. His blade went right through it—no shock of bone—and the whole weight of the thing slammed him off his feet.
He fell back, and hit his head. He didn’t go out, but the burning hot, rubbery weight of it pushed him to action—talons screamed across his thigh, and he felt the poison hit him.
His volition started to leak out of him.
Donna Beatrice slammed her dagger into its whipcord-thin back. She’d killed chickens and she’d killed sheep and her arm was sure; even facing something that defied reason, her hand did its task. She severed its spinal cord. She was screaming like a banshee, but her knife was sure. Its sword clattered to the ground.
Long Paw felt it go, because for almost a full second, it had been him. It was a terrible emptying; one moment he burned with power, and the next he was an empty vessel.
Long Paw lay in the mud, staring up at the rain-laden sky.
Donna Beatrice continued to stab the dead thing for quite some time. Her blows landed with meaty sounds. She was still screaming at the top of her lungs.
The horses were racing around the inside of the walls as if the little orchard were a race course.
Long Paw wasn’t sure who he was. And then he was a little sure, and then a little more.
Brown vaulted the wall of the enclosure and almost died under the hooves of M’bub Ali’s stallion. Brown rolled and then leaped and managed to get clear of a wild-eyed mare.
He looked for a moment at the thing. The Etruscan woman was kneeling by Long Paw, and she was thrusting, dagger reversed in both hands, over and over into the thing’s back.
Long Paw’s sword was through its head.
And as fast as Donna Beatrice stabbed it, the wounds healed. He had thought her maddened, but she was merely panicked, and nonetheless doing what she could; the talons were hacked away.
Brown reached into his shirt, leaned down, and plunged ten inches of witchbane into the creature.
It spasmed.
He left it there.
The wounds stopped closing.
The woman looked at him. She was covered in blood like an actor at the end of a tragedy. She was also burned all over her body, her clothes full of holes as if she’d been attacked by deadly moths.
Brown grabbed the corpse. It was hot to the touch, and it felt wrong, and he used his revulsion to hurl it as far as he could. It didn’t weigh much.
Long Paw’s eyes fluttered open.
Brown’s dagger hand was steady and the point of the dagger was at Long Paw’s throat.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Long Paw’s eyes met his. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.
Four hours had passed, and they were in the mill at the side of a river. Long Paw was sensible enough to know it when they got him off his horse; the rain was lighter, but he was cold, soaked through, and none of them looked good. M’bub Ali was badly wounded; one of his horse boys was dead and two more wounded. All o
f them stank of mud; all were cold and wet.
Sauce was there in person with the duchess. Long Paw smiled at her; he knew her; his head was coming back together, although there were odd flashes in the corner of his eyes and things were not right in his head; Donna Beatrice had him under one shoulder and Lucca under the other.
“Lay him down. There’s beds. Magistera Tancreda is here and ready to work. And our doctors. Thank God we had no casualties today.” Sauce shook her head. “Paw, you look like shit.”
They pushed Long Paw down.
“Talk when you are better,” she said. “Who is this?”
“Donna Beatrice,” Long Paw said. “Put her on the rolls. She killed the fucking thing.”
The Duchess of Venike was right behind his commander, but her eyes went unerringly to Brown. “Did you get him?” she asked.
Brown shook his head. “It’s a fairly complex matter,” he said. “But the Patriarch is inarguably dead.”
Sauce waited until the two company doctors and Tancreda were clearly at work, and then she went up the mill steps with the duchess, Brown, Donna Beatrice, and Daniel Favour.
“Who are they?” she asked from the landing.
Brown followed her finger. “Captain, that’s M’bub Ali. He is … hmm. An officer of the Sultan.”
The duchess nodded. “Alison, they helped us at Mitla; seems like years ago. They were here to scout the Darkness.”
“Spies,” Alison said.
“Allies,” Giselle said.
“Good allies,” Brown muttered. He handed over a long bundle. “Fell Sword. It had it.”
Sauce raised an eyebrow. But she shrugged and continued up the steps to the room that had once been occupied by the mill’s owners. There her body squire poured wine and Brown slumped into a chair.
“Not used to all these people,” he muttered.
Giselle smiled. “But the Patriarch is dead.”
Brown told the story, drinking his wine. He told it sparely but professionally, and they asked him questions, and then they asked Donna Beatrice questions, and then they ate a light meal, and by then Long Paw was awake and more himself.
“What was it, Paw?” Sauce asked.
Long Paw shook his head. “Never seen anything like it,” he said.
Tancreda had all her patients treated; her healing skills were minimal, but with two doctors to support her, she had stabilized M’bub Ali and saved both of his men, and Long Paw’s poison was wearing off of its own accord, hurried along by wine. She joined them on the first floor and sipped some sweet white wine herself. She listened to Long Paw’s description and then, with his help, drew a picture of a sucker-faced greyhound with hands instead of paws and long, thorny talons.
“Eeeuuuwww,” she said in disgust.
Donna Beatrice shuddered. “I will see it until I die,” she said in Etruscan.
Tancreda copied out their description of it, alive, and went downstairs with her wine to the blood-soaked bag that contained the thing’s mortal remains.
“Oh, sweet Christ,” she muttered. She summoned the others so that they could see that the thing had rotted almost to nothing—foul slime and a heavy hide and some bones, like something a month in the ground.
Brown shrugged. “It was in the Patriarch,” he said. “When I think about it, I have to wonder if there was one in the Duke of Mitla.”
“Blessed Virgin,” Sauce spat. “Worms and fire dogs.”
“Salamanders,” Long Paw said. “That’s what they are.”
Sauce read over Tancreda’s coded dispatch. She wrote Salamander in her own hand under the sketch. And then, in her own code, she wrote, I think we’ve found Kronmir’s fourth player. She looked up, sighed for a lost opportunity, and wrote, I’ll be marching north tomorrow.
Then she took the sword from the old cloak in which it was wrapped and handed it to Tancreda.
“Oh my God,” she said. The sword was fine, but the blade was a rainbow of colours unlike normal steel, and set in it in letters of gold, it said, Durandala.
Sauce smiled. “Always wanted a magic sword,” she said.
Chapter Eight
Loomsack Mountain—Ser Gavin Muriens
Ser Gavin Muriens knew he had very little time to get his army across the Cohocton, and he drove them like a cattle herder in the predawn darkness. But bad luck, or fate, sent a flight of wyverns over before the baggage was fully across; the ford was already muddy, the rain was raising the water level, and nothing was moving until he allowed them to use torches, which were like a beacon for the wyverns. Days of fighting were taking their toll; discipline was not the best, and too many of his best people were already across with the cavalry, whom he had sent first.
He rode back across the ford in the gentle rain, and with Syr Ydrik and his Irkish knights as an escort and Tapio as a companion, he rode west to the top of the round-topped mountain that dominated the ford.
To the west, in the very earliest light of day, he could see for a mile or more, and the road and the whole vale of the Cohocton seemed to be alive.
Gavin shook his head.
“He’s coming for us,” he said.
Tapio looked. “We will have to fight to cover our retreat.” He shrugged. “If you are correct, man, then he knowsss by now.”
“We need all of Redmede’s people and the Moreans,” Gavin said. “They’re the back of the column. And get us a caster.”
He waved at Giannis Griatzas, now one of his squires. “Get the Redmedes and all their people.” He thought a moment. “And the Duchess Mogon, if she will come.”
Griatzas bowed and rode off into the rain.
“You will sssacrifice them,” Tapio asked.
Gavin tugged the water out of his beard. “Not if I can help it,” he said. “Look; with this hill in our hands, we can cover the baggage and all the infantry across the ford. And then we slip away; it won’t be easy, but we’ll be on the wrong side of the river and he’ll be caught.”
“Man, if he crosssesss the river, it is we who will be caught.” Tapio smiled and his fangs showed. “But neverthelessss. If he followsss, he is sssurely defeated by disstance.”
“It will be bad, for the rear guard,” Gavin said. He was looking at his own knights.
Loomsack Mountain—Bill Redmede
Duchess Mogon was watching the chaos at the river crossing with increasing annoyance and a good deal of fear when Griatzas found her. But Griatzas was a very mature young man and he knew that he was requesting, not ordering; her beak opened and shut twice with a click, but she didn’t bridle or raise her crest.
“Very well,” she said. “We will come.”
She snapped orders to her household, and almost four hundred wardens rose to their feet. Their plumes were soaked, but the inlay in their beaks and the colour on their hides showed.
She herself sprinted at superhuman speed to where Harold Redmede was getting his people on their feet; sheer exhaustion and long habituation had most of the rangers asleep in the rain.
He flinched a little at her wave front of fear, but then grinned. “You comin’ with us, Your Grace?”
She yawned her beak. “If the bogglins get into our retreat at the ford,” she said, and left the sentence to hang.
“Let’s go, you villains!” Redmede called.
Men cursed; Stern Rachel continued her efforts to light her pipe, ignoring her corporal.
Next to her, Long Peter was fondling his dry bow string. “Fucking rain,” he said. “But if’n the demons are wi’ us, maybe it’s not a one-way trip.”
None of the rangers were under any illusions about their chances, covering the retreat of the army.
But they turned away from the chaos at the ford and walked back into the rain, headed west; away from safety, and into the face of the enemy.
Magister Nikos joined them on his mule. He rode along, one knee locked over the cantle of his saddle, a book open on his lap, spectacles perched on his nose. He didn’t seem to notice that the rain was gr
adually working on the ink.
Kwoqwethogan, Mogon’s nest brother, was the best mage she had left; he trotted alongside her for half a league as they climbed the mountain and then sprinted ahead, his heavy feet slamming onto the rocky trail and making the earth shake, until he caught up with Master Nikos.
His bronze and gold-inlaid beak was level with the grammarian’s head. The Morean closed his book carefully, latched it, and dropped it back into a saddlebag full of books.
“My lady says, our enemy will come. In person.” The warden bowed his great head. All the wardens were respectful of the grammarian; although his powers were not the strongest, the fineness of his control was without rival anywhere.
The warden mage spoke. “I am to give you my powers, and those of my sisters, too. We will not cast; we will fuel you.”
Master Nikos nodded, as if this was perfectly reasonable. It was; but even Nikos knew it was an outstanding example of cooperation and trust. “I want to take this a step further,” he said, and outlined a detailed hermetical proposal.
Kwoqwethogan flinched.
“We will always be linked,” Nikos admitted. “I don’t see another choice.”
The great warden shrugged. “You did this with Lord Kerak,” he said.
Nikos nodded. “And a little of me died when he died,” he admitted. “And now I have an overwhelming urge to catch and eat beaver.”
The adversarius mage, once an architect of the alliance with Thorn, chuckled. “Beaver are delicious,” he admitted. “And when you swim into one of the giant beaver nests and take their young …”
His crest inflated, and his long, purple tongue licked the heavy teeth in his beak.
Magister Nikos held his breath a moment. “Yeees,” he managed. When he and the other magister had exchanged their aethereal sigils, he managed to ride on without a shudder.
On the western face of the mountain side, Syr Ydrik and Tapio opened the action by charging the enemy scouts on a wide front, collapsing the bogglins and a handful of enemy wardens on great swamp trolls back against their support. But Ash’s column was not an organized body in battalions, or even in the traditional human divisions of vanguard, main body, and rear guard; and despite his control of a major part of their wills, there were still instincts of self preservation at work even in the scent-captive bogglins, and the steady casualties among the leaders of the column had led to a certain caution.