Monarchies Of God - Hawkwoods Voyage Part 3

"I claim its paw, Ellon. It's the biggest I've ever seen."

"Where in the name of the Saint is it?"

There was a silence, heavy with fear. The powder smoke refused to clear; in fact if anything it was growing thicker by the moment. The arquebusiers blundered around, terrified, sure that the shifter had somehow called up a fog and was still alive in the midst of it, biding its time.

"Sorcery!" one wailed. "The beast lives! It'll be at our throats in a moment. This is no gunpowder smoke!"

Their sergeant tried to rally them, but they made off, some dropping their weapons, seeking only to get away from the unnatural smoke. They scattered, shouting, whilst the folk who lived on the street shuttered their windows despite the heat of the night and knelt behind locked doors, quaking.

S LOWLY , my little comrade, slowly. Look into him. Can you see the heat? Is that the radiance of his heart, beating yet? Yes! See how the bright bloodlines clot and heal themselves, the darker holes knit together and close. And there is the eye rebuilding itself, pushing out again like anair-filled bladder.

Bardolin was trembling with strain. Casting was difficult enough at the best of times without having to relay it through his familiar. And now the creature was edging out of his control, like a tool slipping in sweat-blurred hands. It wanted to come home to its safe, quiet shelf, but Bardolin was making it approach the great body that lay seemingly inert on the ground with its blood a thick sticky pool around it.

A hairy piece of meat slithered across the stones and reattached itself to the shifter.

Bardolin was lucky in the powder smoke. All he had had to do was thicken it, and the still, humid air of the night had done the rest. But now he was attempting something more difficult. Mindrhyming, through the minute skull of the imp. The familiar acted as a buffer, a cut-off, but a frail one. Its heart would fail if it suffered much more stress this night, but there was not much time. The fog was thinning, and the patrol would soon return with reinforcements.

Shifter, can you hear me? Are you listening?

Pain agony light blooming in my skull the muzzles pointing at me rend them tear them drink sweet blood dying. Dying.

Shifter! Listen to me. I am a friend. Look at me. See the imp before you.

The yellow eyes blazed, shot with blood.

"I see you. Whose are you?"

The imp spoke with its master's voice, quivering with relief. Its brain was near overload. "Bardolin. I am the mage Bardolin. Follow the imp and it will lead you to me."

The huge muzzle worked. The words came out as a growl.

"Why should you help me?"

"We are brothers, Shifter. They are after us all."

The shifter raised its blood-mired head off the cobbles and seemed to sigh. "You have the right of it there. Lead on, then, but go slow-and no crevices or cracks. I am no imp that can crawl through keyholes."

They moved out, the imp scampering ahead, its eyes two green lights shining in the dark, the shifter a hulking, shattered shape behind it. After them the cadenced step of the city patrol came echoing up the street.

T HE imp was barely conscious by the time it returned, and Bardolin immediately popped it into a rejuvenating jar. The shifter entered the room warily, the candlelight shining on the broken places in its body that had not yet mended. Its heat was overwhelming; a by-product of the sorcery which kept its form stable. Hunched with pain though it was, it towered over Bardolin like some black, spiked monolith, the saffron-bright eyes slitted like a cat's. Its horn-like ears sc.r.a.ped the ceiling.

"I thirst."

The mage nodded and sank a gourd dipper in the pail he had prepared. The shifter took it and drank greedily, water running down the fur of the bull-thick neck. Then it slumped to the floor."Can you shift back yet?" Bardolin asked.

The creature shook its great head. "My injuries would kill me. I must remain in this form until they are healed . . . I am called Tabard, Griella Tabard. I thank you for my life."

Bardolin waved a hand. "They took away my apprentice today. Tomorrow they will take away me. I have brought you a momentary respite, no more."

"Nevertheless I am in your debt. I will kill them tomorrow when they come for you, hold them off so you may escape."

"Escape? To where? The soldiery have Abrusio sealed off tighter than a virago's bustle. There is no escape for the likes of us, my friend."

"Then why did you aid me?"

Bardolin shrugged. "I do not like wanton slaughter."

The shifter laughed, a hideous sound in the beast's mouth. "You say that to the likes of me, a sufferer of the black disease? Wanton slaughter is half my nature." The creature sounded bitter.

"And yet, you do not kill me."

"I . . . I would not harm a friend. Like a fool I came down out of the Hebros, seeking a cure for my affliction, and arrived here in the midst of a purge. I killed my father, Mage."

"Why?"

"We are a simple folk, we mountain dwellers. He tried to force me."

Bardolin was puzzled, and the beast laughed again. "No matter. You will understand in the morning maybe. For now, I am hurt and weary. I would sleep here if you'll let me."

"For tonight you will be my guest. Is there anything I can do for your hurts?"

"No. They heal themselves. It takes a lot to kill a full-blooded shape-shifter, though no doubt your magicks could do so in a trice. Those stinking militia thought to use me for their sport, and before I could stop myself the change was upon me. Then the hue and cry began. Six of them at least I slew. I was fortunate. Some of them have taken to using iron b.a.l.l.s in their arquebuses. That would have been my end."

Bardolin nodded. Iron and silver were the only things which disrupted the magical regenerative powers of a shifter. Golophin had presented a paper on the subject to the Mages' Guild only the year before, little knowing it would soon be put to use.

Bardolin yawned. His imp stared dreamily at him from the liquid depths of its jar. He tapped the gla.s.s, and the little mouth smiled vaguely. It would be recovered in the morning. Some mages, it was rumoured, had bigger jars made for themselves to rejuvenate their ailing bodies, but there was the cautionary tale of the treacherous apprentice who had not followed instructions and had left his master in the jar to smile dreamily for all eternity.

"I'm for bed," he told his monstrous guest. "You are safe here tonight; the imp made sure you were not followed. But it will be dawn in less than four hours. If you wish to make good your escape before then you are welcome.""I will be here when you wake," the shifter insisted.

"If you will. The soldiers usually come midmorning, after a hearty breakfast and a tot of rum."

The shifter grinned horribly. "They will have need of their rum if they are to take us."

Us? Bardolin thought. But his bed was calling him. Perhaps tomorrow night he would be sharing a pallet of bare stone with Orquil in the catacombs.

"Goodnight, then." He tottered off to bed, an old man in need of rest. The Dweomer always did that to him, and working through the imp had been doubly exhausting.

H E woke up, though, in the dark hour before the dawn with a name going through his head.

Griella?

And when he crept downstairs, instead of the monstrous, bloodied beast, he saw sleeping on his floor the pale shape of a nude young woman.

FOUR.

T HE fire was brightening as evening drew on. The storm had blown itself out and the sky was a washed-out blue with rags of sunset-tinted clouds scudding off along the darkening horizon. Northward the Thurian Mountains loomed, dark and tall, and to the south-east the sunset was rivalled by another red glow that gave way to a black smoke cloud like the thunderhead of an approaching tempest. Aekir, still ablaze even now.

Closer by a constellation of winking lights littered the earth for as far as a tired man might care to look.

The campfires of a defeated army, and the mult.i.tude of refugees that clung to it. A teeming throng, enough to populate half a dozen minor cities, sat under the light of the first stars and the waning moon, cooking what food they had gleaned from the famished countryside, or sitting blank-eyed with their stares anch.o.r.ed in the flames.

As Corfe was sitting.

Perhaps a dozen of them squatted round the wind-ruffled campfire, their faces black with soot and filth and encrusted blood. Aekir was ten leagues back, but the red glimmer of its dying had followed them for the past five days. It would follow them for ever, Corfe thought, fastening on their minds like a succubus.

Heria.

He poked at the blackened turnips in the fire with a stick and finally managed to lever one out of the ashes. The others at the fire eyed it hungrily, but knew better than to ask for some. They knew enough not to cross this silent soldier of Mogen's.

Corfe did not wince as the turnip burnt his fingers. He wiped off the ash and then ate mechanically. A sabre lay in its scabbard at his side. He had taken it off a dead trooper to replace the one he had lost in the flight from the city. It and his tattered uniform commanded respect from his fellow fugitives. There were men who went about the displaced horde in ragam.u.f.fin bands, killing for food and gold and horses, anything which would speed their journey west, to safety. Corfe had slain four of them, appropriating their meagre spoils for himself. Thus he was the richer by three turnips.

Merduk cavalry had shadowed the ma.s.s of moving people ever since they had left Aekir's flaming gates, but had not closed. They were monitoring the progress of the fleeing hordes, channelling them along theSearil road like so many sheep. Leagues to the rear, it was said, Sibastion Lejer and eight thousand of the surviving garrison were fighting a hopeless rearguard battle against twelve times their number. The Merduk would let the noncombatants escape, it seemed, but not what was left of the Torunnan army.

Which makes me an absconder, a deserter, Corfe thought calmly. I should be back there dying with the others, making an end worth a song.

The thought raised a sneer on his face. He bit into the wood-hard turnip.

Children crying in the gathering darkness, a woman keening softly nearby. Corfe wondered what they would find when they got to the Searil line, and shook his head when he considered the enormity of the task awaiting its defenders. Like as not the Merduk would strike when the confusion of the refugee influx was at its height. That was why Lejer and his men were making their stand, to buy time for the Searil forces.

And what will I do when I reach the river? he wondered. Offer my services to the nearest tercio?

No. He would trek on west. Torunna was done for. Best to keep going, across the Cimbric Mountains, perhaps, and into Perigraine. Or even further west, to Fimbria. He could sell his services to the highest bidder. All the kingdoms were crying out for fighting men these days, even men who had run with their tails between their legs.

That would be giving up any dream of ever finding his wife again.

She is dead, Corfe, an empty-eyed corpse in a gutter of Aekir.

He prayed it was so.

There was a commotion in the firelit gloom, movement. His hand strayed to his sabre as a long line of mounted shapes came looming up. Cavalry, all light and shadow as they wound through the dotted campfires. People raised hands to them as they pa.s.sed. It was a half-troop heading east, joining Lejer's embattled command, no doubt. They would have a devil of a time fighting their way through the Merduk screen.

Something in Corfe stirred. He wanted momentarily to be riding east with them, seeking a hero's oblivion. But the feeling pa.s.sed as quickly as the shadowed hors.e.m.e.n. He gnawed on his turnip and glared at those who peered too closely at his tattered livery. Let the fools ride east. There was nothing there but death or slavery and the burning ruins of an empty city.

"T HERE is a rutter, a chart-book, that will confirm the man's story," Murad told the King.

"Rutters can be forged," Abeleyn said.

"Not this one, Majesty. It is over a century old, and most of it details the everyday pa.s.sages of an everyday oceangoer. It contains bearings and soundings, moon changes and tides for half a hundred ports from Rovenan of the corsairs to Skarma Sound in far Hardukh, or Ferdiac as it was known then. It is authentic."

The King grunted noncommittally. They were seated on a wooden bench in his pleasure garden, but even this high above the city it was possible to catch the reek of the pyre. The sun beat down relentlessly, but they were in the dappled shade of a stand of mighty cypresses. Acacia and juniper made a curtain about them. The gra.s.s was green and short, a lawn tended by a small army of gardeners and nourished with a stupefying volume of water diverted from the city aqueducts.Abeleyn popped an olive into his mouth, sipped his cold wine and turned the crackling pages of the old chart-book with delicate care.

"So this western voyage is authentic also, this landfall made in the uttermost west?"

"I believe so."

"Let us say you are right, cousin. What would you have me do about it?"

Murad smiled. His smile was humourless, wry. It twisted his narrow face into an expression of knowing ruefulness.

"Why, help me outfit a voyage to test its veracity."

Abeleyn slammed the ancient book shut, sending little flakes of powder-dry paper into the air. He set one long-fingered hand atop the salt-stained cover. Sweat beaded his temples, coiling his dark hair into tiny, dripping tails.

"Do you know, cousin, what kind of a week I've had?"

"I-".

"First I have this G.o.d-cursed-may the Saints forgive me-holy Prelate with his putrefactive intrigues in search of more authority; I have the worthy merchants of the city crying on my shoulder about his-no, our-edict's resultant damage to trade; then I have old Golophin avoiding me-and who can blame him?-just at the time when I need his counsel most; I have this blasted burning every G.o.d-given hour of the day in the one month of the year when the trade wind has fallen, so that we wallow in it like peasants in a chimneyless hut; and finally I have the Torunnan king screaming for troops at the one time when I cannot afford to give them to him-so up in more smoke goes the Torunnan monopoly trade. And now you say I should outfit an expedition into the unknown, presumably so that I may rid myself of the burden of a few good ships and the crack-brained notions of a sunstruck kinsman."

Murad sipped wine. "I did not say that you should provide the ships, Majesty."

"Oh, they'll spring out of the yards fully rigged, will they?"

"I could, with your authority, commandeer some civilian ships-four would suffice-and command them as your viceroy. A detachment of marines is all I would have to ask you for, and I would have volunteers aplenty from my own tercio."

"And supplies, provisions, equipment?"

"There is any amount of that locked up in warehouses all along the wharves-the confiscated property of arrested merchants and captains. And I know for a fact that I could crew half a flotilla from the foreign seamen currently languishing in the palace catacombs."

Abeleyn was silent. He stared at his kinsman closely.

"You come here with some interesting notions under your scalp along with the tomfoolery, cousin," he said at last. "Maybe you will overreach yourself yet."

Murad's pale countenance became a shade whiter. He was a long, lean n.o.bleman with lank dark hair and a nose any peregrine would have been proud of. The eyes suited the nose: grey as a fish's flank, and with something of the same brightness when they caught the light. One cheek was ridged with a long scar,the legacy of a fight with one of the corsairs. It was a surpa.s.singly ugly, even sinister face, and yet Murad had never lacked the companionship of the fairer s.e.x. There was a magnetic quality about him that drew them like moths to a candle flame until, burnt, they limped away again. Several of their outraged husbands, fathers and brothers had challenged Murad to duels. None had survived.

"Tell me again how you came by this doc.u.ment," Abeleyn said softly.

Murad sighed. "One of my new recruits was telling tall tales. His family were insh.o.r.e fishermen, and his great-grandfather had a story of a crewless ship that came up out of the west one day when he and his father were out on the herrin run. His father boarded with three others, but a shifter was on board, the only thing living, and it killed them. The ship-it was a high-seas carrack bound out of Abrusio half a year before-was settling slowly and the yawlsmen drew off. But the shifter jumped overboard and swam for sh.o.r.e. They reboarded to collect their dead and the boy, as he was then, found the rutter in the stern cabin along with the corpse of the master and took it as a sort of were-gild for his father's life."

"How old is this man?" Abeleyn demanded.

Murad shifted uncomfortably. "He died some fifteen years ago. This is a tale kept by the family."

"The mutterings of an old man garbled by the pa.s.sage of time and the exaggerations of peasant storytelling."

"The rutter bears the story out, Majesty," Murad protested. "The Western Continent exists, and what is more the voyage there is practicable."

Abeleyn bent his head in thought. His thick, curly hair was hardly touched by grey as yet. A young king fighting against encroachments on his authority from the Church, the guilds, other monarchs. His father had had no such problems, but then his father had not lived to see the fall of Aekir.

We live in trialling times, he thought, and smiled unpleasantly.

"I do not have the time to pore over an ancient rutter, Murad. I will take what you have told me on trust.