The Fell Sword

  The Red Knight’s face twitched.

  God is on your side, Gabriel.

  Harmodius was laughing in his head, and he had a building headache of epic proportions. The truth was that his hours free of Harmodius had taught him that he had to rid himself of his guest. Without meaning to, his eyes flicked over to where Morgan Mortirmir stood, behind Ser Alison.

  Please leave me alone, Harmodius.

  Oh – are we sensitive now? Harmodius laughed. I have a major work under way now. I’d love to show you what I’m forging—

  Shut the fuck up.

  The Red Knight focused on the tent and saw them all looking at him. He forced himself to nod agreeably – he held onto his temper and his irritation about the Emperor’s intrusion. Anger would gain him nothing.

  Although, in fact, it was increasingly difficult to be chivalrous when his temples seemed to clang against the bones of his skull like loose shoulderplates and his guest continued to indulge in remarks he clearly found witty.

  Slow recovery from the wound he’d taken at Christmas – two wounds, really – left him weaker than he wanted to be. His left arm hurt whenever it was cold, and right now that was all the time.

  All that, in the blink of an eye.

  ‘As usual,’ he said lightly, ‘I have a plan.’

  The ancient citadel of Nemea towered above the plains and looked across a shallow gulf at the beaches of Ermione to the south. The mountains behind Ermione were still capped in snow, but here on the coast, the day was hot and flowers were already in bloom.

  Andronicus sat with his chin in his hand, contemplating a variety of futures. His son and his magister had just crossed the town’s main bridge.

  Andronicus was an old campaigner, and he knew from the postures of the men riding behind his son that they had failed, and the Emperor was free.

  Andonicus sighed. He swirled the wine in his golden cup. He smiled grimly at the former Grand Chamberlain.

  ‘My lord?’ the man asked. Defeat had not spoiled the man’s ability to be obsequious, Andronicus noted with some inner amusement.

  Andronicus took a careful sip of wine. ‘I’m going to wager that we’ve lost the Emperor.’

  The Grand Chamberlain flinched visibly.

  Andonicus nodded. ‘Time, I think, to send a message to the city and seek terms.’

  The Grand Chamberlain knew that that was a death sentence for him. Andronicus was the Emperor’s cousin. He’d have his estates restored, and be slapped on the wrist. But someone would have to be the scapegoat, and the man’s fear showed in his eyes.

  Andronicus took another measured sip and watched the snow-capped hills. ‘Etrusca might be nice,’ he said.

  He hadn’t quite finished drinking the wine when his son, resplendent in golden armour, was announced by his staff.

  Demetrius sank to one knee. ‘He was gone,’ he said. Behind him, the magister, Aeskipiles, entered. The man looked worse than usual – paler, with heavy, dark circles under his eyes.

  Andronicus had seldom loved his son as much as he did in that moment. He put out a hand. ‘I know,’ he said.

  Demetrius’s eyes were bright. ‘Listen, Father. We must crown you emperor. Today. Now. Declare the true emperor dead. And—’

  Andronicus smiled. ‘No,’ he said.

  Demetrius shook his head. ‘No, listen! This Red Knight has made a fool’s error, for all he has the body of the Emperor. He’s trapped against the mountains. We have the whole weight of our spring levy. We catch him, crush him, and kill the Emperor.’

  ‘As we should have in the first place,’ Aeskipiles put in.

  Andonicus shook his head. ‘No. Listen, my friends. I wanted to unseat the Emperor to save the empire. He is – a fool.’ He looked around. ‘But if I lead my levies and my infantry and my stradiotes down into the valleys of Morea to war – who then is the fool? What will we leave? More carcasses for the Etruscans and the Outwallers – and the Albans – to pluck. We threw the dice and we failed. The fool found friends. Now, we are the enemies of our own country.’

  ‘Irene betrayed us,’ Demetrius said.

  Andronicus’s eyes crossed his son’s with a little of his former fire. ‘I should have been more wary of a woman who would betray her own father,’ he said.

  Demetrius was still kneeling at his feet. ‘I am not prepared to submit,’ he said.

  Andronicus smiled. ‘You are a brave young man,’ he said.

  ‘We can win!’ Demetrius insisted.

  ‘I agree that you can win the battle. At the end of it, many hundreds of our best men will be dead. So will the mercenary force and many hundreds of the Emperor’s best guardsmen. So? Irene will still hold the city. The war will go on. But the Empire will be weaker by every man either side loses.’ Andronicus sipped his wine. ‘Wine for my council. Let us compose our submission.’

  Aeskipiles made a motion.

  Demetrius was still kneeling by the Duke’s chair. ‘Father,’ he said, and his voice held a rare note of pleading. ‘Father!’ he insisted.

  Andromicus smiled at him.

  Demetrius said, ‘We will not submit.’

  Andronicus nodded. ‘You and the magister and the Grand Chamberlain?’

  Demetrius stood suddenly, towering over his father in his gleaming golden armour. ‘Yes!’

  Andronicus nodded. ‘I reccomend the three of you board a ship, then,’ he said. His voice hardened. ‘Because, before God, I am the Duke of Thrake. And the army camped outside obeys me.’ He caught the movement of the Grand Chamberlain. He frowned. ‘Guard!’ he roared.

  ‘Father!’ Demetrius shouted. ‘Stop and listen!’

  Demetrius drew the heavy dagger at his hip. He stared at it a moment, as if confused.

  Andronicus froze. ‘Oh, my son!’ he said.

  Demetrius was shaking his head. ‘I won’t!’ he cried.

  Andronicus had not risen to be the warlord of the Empire by failure to grasp threats. His eyes went to the Grand Chamberlain, already moving to flank him, and to Aeskipiles, who stood silently, by the door, his staff emitting a pair of thick black threads – one to the Grand Chamberlain, and one to Demetrius.

  Andonicus didn’t flinch or give a speech. He drew his own belt dagger and threw it – at Aeskipiles.

  It struck an invisible shield and vanished in a shower of sparks.

  Aeskipiles smiled.

  Andronicus’ throw had got him to his feet and now he stepped to the right, still trying to believe that his son was going to protect him.

  Demetrius’s dagger went into his left side, under the arm. He felt the blow like a punch – felt the hilt against the silk of his shirt.

  Without meaning to, he rotated his son’s body and got a thumb onto his son’s right eye, even as he realised that he was dead. His sight was going. But the urge to fight back – to kill – was strong.

  The dagger had struck straight to his heart.

  With his last thought, he released his grasp on his son’s head.

  ‘My—’

  He hit the floor.

  ‘We need to dispose of the body immediately.’ He heard the man-witch say it, as if from a hillside far, far away. He craved to hear something of his son. He willed—

  And then he was gone.

  A day after the loss of the Emperor to the Red Knight’s men, one of Dariusz’s patrols picked up a pair of peasants who had a report of rape and murder from the hills to the west. Dariusz lost half a day following these reports up and by the time he made it back to report, the Duke was absent and he was reporting to Demetrius. The Prokusatores officer left Despot Demetrius’s tent and approached the khan of Demetrius’s Easterners.

  The man shrugged and looked away.

  Duke Andronicus apparently no longer rode with the army he’d raised. Captain Dariusz knew many of the retainers. Eventually he asked Ser Chritos’s squire, who shrugged and admitted that the Duke hadn’t left Nemea. Many men were aware that the Duke had vanished, and Dariusz kept his ear to the ground
, but heard nothing. He assumed the Duke was sick, and his sickness was being hidden, but he had darker suspicions.

  He snatched a few hours sleep in the castle of Ermione and then took a powerful patrol west, following the tracks. To his own satisfaction he found the place where the enemy had waited in ambush.

  He showed his two best men the place, like a deer lie writ large – snow trampled flat, a small fire, a lookout post complete with closely woven branches and a wall of snow.

  Verki – one of his best – stirred the fire with a stick and made a small magic.

  ‘Ten hours. Last light, maybe?’ He shrugged, his gesture exaggerated by his long fur coat and heavily padded armour.

  Dariusz raised an eyebrow. ‘Let’s see,’ he said.

  He followed the tracks left by the enemy horses. They’d done well enough in covering them – swept the snow with branches – but by luck, there hadn’t been a snowfall since, and there were places where shod hoof marks showed clear, and where horse dung lay frozen in the snow. Sixty cavalrymen moving quickly are very difficult to hide in a winter landscape.

  It was almost noon when they climbed a long ridge. There were horsemen above them, and they had a brief skirmish – a horse died. A man broke his back when another horse fell, and had to be killed.

  They seized the ridge top and looked down into the next valley. The enemy rode away.

  ‘You know this country?’ Verki asked.

  Dariusz shook his head. ‘Not really. I’ve hunted here.’

  Verki frowned. ‘Something is wrong,’ he said. He peered down into the valley. The snow reflected the bright sunlight and made everything difficult to see even though, lower in the valley, the snow was melting and the streams were filling.

  Dariusz spotted the walled village protected by a switchback in the winding stream. ‘There’s the town,’ he said.

  ‘With no smoke from the chimneys,’ Verki spat.

  They looked at the valley for longer, and saw the patrol of enemy horsemen they’d pushed off the ridge riding along the floor of the valley far below. They crossed the stream.

  Dariusz put a wrap on the wound he’d taken in the left hand and began to feel cold.

  ‘I’ve got the bastards. Follow the line of the ford. Look at the ridge top.’ Verki smiled savagely.

  The faintest smudge of smoke was visible.

  Dariusz nodded. ‘That must be their camp.’

  Verki shook his head. ‘Just covered by the ridge. Someone knows his business.’

  ‘Leave a post here. Take two men you trust and get a look at their camp.’ Dariusz was breathing easier. The enemy had seemed almost ghostly until now. He still had no idea how they’d got over the mountains. But now he had them fixed in place, and Lord Demetrius would bring up the army.

  As he turned his horse and rode east, he had time to consider a number of problems, not the least of which was that he didn’t know where Duke Andronicus was.

  ‘You have them?’ Demetrius asked. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  ‘We brushed a patrol. We saw the smoke from their camp.’ It sounded thin, put that way.

  Demetrius glared at the khan of his Easterners. ‘Better than anyone else has done. Christ Pantrokrator, one of these fools proposed they’d come by sea!’

  Dariusz leaned over the Count’s rough map. ‘He’s trapped against the mountains, exactly as you suggested, my lord, and he’ll be out of food in a few days. The villages up there won’t feed an army.’ Dariusz shrugged. ‘I think perhaps we will not even need ot fight.’

  ‘You sound like my father.’ Demetrius spat.

  Dariusz flinched – it was such an odd comment and so uncharacteristic.

  Demetrius looked at the warlock, Aeskepiles. And the former Grand Chamberlain.

  Aeskepiles nodded. Very quietly, he said, ‘As I have said before, we must kill the Emperor. And then we must ensure it appears that the enemy killed him in desperation. I will take care of the latter. But he must be killed, and to achieve that we must attack.’ He shrugged. ‘If the Emperor is spirited away over the mountains—’

  Demetrius laughed. ‘Over the Penults? In late winter?’ He shook his head. ‘A bird would die.’

  Dariusz, who had hunted the Penults since he was a boy, disagreed. ‘My lord,’ he said.

  Demetrius raised a hand. ‘I’m not interested in your carping. I’m not interested in skulking about in the snow waiting for them to starve. Or worse yet, surrender, so that we have a horde of witnesses.’

  Aeskepiles smiled. ‘That could be dealt with.’

  Demetrius paused. His gaze hardened. ‘Warlock, I realise I need you. But have a care. We need there to be an Empire when this is over. If I massacre the guard, who exactly will protect me when I am Emperor?’

  ‘Who will guard your father, you mean,’ Dariusz said carefully.

  ‘My father has – mm – withdrawn from the army,’ Demetrius said. ‘He has no further interest in this contest, and will enter a monastery.’

  For some reason, it was Aeskipiles, and not Demetrius, who looked away.

  Dariusz pursed his lips and then nodded. ‘I see,’ he said.

  Ser Christos led the main cavalry force. Every Thrakian stradiote had two horses, and they made excellent time over the snow now the scouts had cleared the ground. Demetrius came in a second division, with all of his father’s veteran infantry, and Ser Stefanos brought up the rear with a strong force of Thrakian peasants armed with axes, bowmen from the estates around Lonika, and Easterner mercenary cavalry.

  They took just four hours to traverse what the scouts had taken all day to cover. They pitched a hasty camp at the base of the great ridge and made contact with Verki’s piquet at the top of the ridge. They stripped the forest for wood and built big fires, protected from view as they were by a horde of frozen sentries and the bulk of the snow-covered mountain between them.

  Before first light Verki led the army up the snowy ridge. The moonlight on the snow made the road – if it could be called that – like a black slit of frozen mud in a white wilderness, but they moved fast enough. By the last grey light before dawn, they could just see a line of motionless sentries in red tabards, the bright wink of forty fires, and the smoke rising to the heavens. They could smell the smoke. And they could see the magnificent red pavilion in the middle of camp and the forty heavy wagons of the enemy baggage parked in a wagon fort.

  Dariusz had thought the plan rash, and had said so, and now he watched in amazement as Demetrius carefully marshalled his men.

  Aeskepiles, at the young commander’s request, sent a small fireball whizzing into the heavens.

  The Thrakians screamed like monsters out of the Wild. The veterans of Duke Andronicus went forward fast, singing a hymn. The cavalry closed from the flanks.

  Off to the east, over the sea, the sun crested the horizon, but here in the mountains behind the coast, it was just an orange and pink outline on the mountains behind them. They crossed the ground, lumbering heavily in deep snow.

  Someone screamed – the sound of a man in soul-wrenching pain.

  A horse went down.

  The enemy sentries weren’t moving and weren’t calling the alarm.

  Another man went down. It happened close enough to Dariusz that he saw the pit open under the man’s feet, saw him fall and impale himself on the stakes at the base of the pit. A snow trap.

  Dariusz stopped running.

  It was a beautiful camp and they took it intact. They took the store of firewood and the fires, which must have been huge, because they had burned down to coals and were still big and warm. They took the wagons – forty beautiful wagons, some full of stores, some full of useful things, including a portable forge for an armourer.

  There were a dozen hogsheads of wine, and that wine was open before the officers could get involved.

  There was a flash, and a noise like a bolt of lightning in the centre of the camp.

  Aeskepiles was seen to hurry there.

&nbs
p; Dariusz found Verki watching one of his scouts die. The man had drunk the wine and it was suddenly pretty obvious it was poisoned. His heels drummed on the packed snow, and he retched blood while more leached out of various other parts.

  ‘Fuck their mothers,’ Verki swore.

  ‘How long have they been gone?’ Dariusz asked.

  Verki looked miserable. ‘At least two days,’ he said. ‘The patrol we fought must have been the fire-tenders.’

  They were negotiating a particularly brutal double switchback, where the Nordikans had to clear the snow with shovels so that anyone could pass, when the Red Knight stiffened in his saddle.

  Heh. Harmodius was gloating.

  Your little gift?

  He’ll know it’s the same working he used on the amulets.

  So now he knows we have Kronmir?

  And that he’s been had. He’ll be mad as hell.

  What happens if he turns around? He can still march back to Lonika the long way around as fast as we can go through the hills – probably faster.

  In the comfortable room of the Red Knight’s memory palace, it was warm. Harmodius sat with his legs over the armrest of a huge chair. He raised a cup of steaming hippocras. He won’t. He’ll be stung, and his ego will be pricked. And he’ll follow you.

  Do I sound that cocky to other people?

  Harmodius shrugged.

  I should stop. You sound so smug I don’t care if we win – I just want you to be wrong.

  Harmodius nodded. May I show you my finest work? he asked.

  The image of the young Captain nodded agreeably. They found themselves in a workshop – an aethereal setting that reflected several workshops that Gabriel Muriens had known. Against the near wall was a bench – a very plain wooden bench lined with tools, each of which had a sigil burning on it.

  On the bench lay a sword.

  What is it? asked the Captain, through a burgeoning headache.

  A Fell Sword, said Harmodius.

  For me? asked the Captain. He was suddenly afraid.