The Ancient

  They all looked to Mcwigik, the chief conspirator in this breakout from Mithranidoon. He certainly didn’t appear as boisterous and determined as he had the previous morning when he had led them to the boat and off their island home.

  “What’re ye thinking?” asked Bikelbrin.

  “And how many days’re ye saying it’s to take us to find the Mirianic?” Pergwick dared interject, drawing a glare from Bikelbrin, though—surprisingly—Mcwigik didn’t react at all to the question.

  “A month to two, he said,” Ruggirs answered. “And each night’s to get colder and longer, aye?”

  “Not so,” Bikelbrin replied. “It ain’t like that.”

  “But generally so,” said Pergwick, and Bikelbrin had to concede that point.

  “More than a month or two,” Ruggirs said.

  “But what are ye knowing about it?” Bikelbrin demanded. “Ye never been!”

  “But I’m knowing that me toes are hurting, and so’re yers,” the younger dwarf argued. “And hurtin’ toes’re meaning slower steps, and slower steps’re meaning more steps and more days, and I’m not for thinking …”

  “We’re going back,” said Mcwigik, and all three looked at him in surprise.

  “We ain’t to make it,” the chief conspirator said, looking directly at Bikelbrin and shaking his head, his face a mask of disappointment. “We ain’t the tools, the weapons, or the clothes. If them wolves don’t eat us alive, they’ll tear the skin from our frozen bones to be sure.”

  “The lake’s not so bad,” said Ruggirs, but no one paid him any heed.

  “I’m wanting the smell o’ the Mirianic in me nose as much as any powrie alive, don’t ye doubt,” Mcwigik went on. “But I’m thinking we’re dead long before we near the place.”

  “If we even know where it is,” Pergwick dared interject, and so downtrodden was Mcwigik, and so surprised by the sudden turn was Bikelbrin, that neither argued a point that would have brought them both to fury only a day before.

  So they gathered their supplies and turned back to the north, and found their boat shortly after sunset. They returned to the powrie island without any ruckus, without any questions, but a few of the dwarfs who had known their plans did offer a superior I-telled-ye-so smirk.

  The bitter defeat stayed with Mcwigik for many weeks.

  THIRTEEN

  Consequences

  Brother Giavno grimaced against the line of fiery pain coming from a deep gash across the meat of his upper arm. He had only avoided the brunt of the hurled spear at the last instant, so close a call that it had poignantly reminded Giavno of his mortality, had pulled him from the battle for a few troublesome seconds as he pondered eternity. With great effort and determination, though, the monk had stubbornly held on to the large rock he had carried this far up the chapel’s stairs. He stumbled through the upper room’s open door and across the small bridge that led to the parapet of the outer wall. Before him monks cried out frantic instructions and scrambled to and fro, trying to avoid the near-constant rain of rocks and spears and other missiles that flew up from below.

  Over to the side of the bridge, a pair of brothers worked desperately to dislodge a ladder, the top rung and the tips of its posts visible above the wall. Giavno shuffled as fast as his burden would allow, and didn’t even pause to confirm when he arrived, just threw his back against the wall immediately below the ladder posts, then heaved the rock up to his shoulder, and over farther, until it dropped from the wall and tumbled down, guided in its fall by the ladder.

  He heard a shout of warning from below, followed by a scream of surprise fast turning to a howl of pain, followed by a crash. Then he dared stand, and turned to look out and regard his work.

  A wave of nausea rolled over him, but, as with the pain in his arm, he gritted his teeth and pushed through it. One man lay on the ground, squirming in pain, his legs obviously shattered and his back probably so. He couldn’t have been far from the top when Giavno’s rock went over, and the more than twenty-foot fall had not been kind.

  Kinder than the rock, however, which the lead climber had apparently eluded, but the spotter, or second climber, had not, taking it squarely on the head.

  She, too, lay on the ground, but she wasn’t squirming, her head split open and her brains splattered about the base of the ladder.

  Giavno swallowed hard. This was his first confirmed kill and a woman at that (though Giavno understood that these barbarian women could fight as well as any man he had ever known in the southland). Given the ferocity and determination of the barbarian attack, this first kill would not be Giavno’s last.

  “Pull it up! Pull it up!” Giavno ordered the other two monks, for the falling rock and falling barbarians had scattered the attackers momentarily. He began to haul, and the others, emboldened by his courage, dared stand up and grab at the sides, hoisting the ladder straight from the ground.

  Down below, barbarians rushed back in. One tall man leaped high and managed to grab onto the bottom rungs, and his weight halted the monks’ progress.

  A fourth brother came to the spot, though, grapnel in hand, and with Giavno’s help, they secured it to the third-highest rung. The attached rope strung down to the small courtyard, feeding into a sturdy cranking mechanism the brothers had constructed to haul large rocks up from the lower portions of the island. The team down below went to work immediately, bending their backs against the poles and methodically walking around the base, cranking in the rope.

  The ladder creaked and groaned in protest, but even the weight of a second barbarian who had leaped up to join his companion couldn’t suppress the pull. With the wall acting as a fulcrum, the ladder’s top dipped and the bottom, two men and all, raised up and out from the wall base. Their feet soon fully ten feet from the ground, the two barbarians stubbornly held on, with more barbarians rushing over and leaping up to secure them by the legs and feet. The sheer human ballast countered the crank and the ladder held steady, three rungs over the wall top, the rest suspended outside the chapel.

  Only momentarily, however, for the ladder snapped apart under the awkward strain, dropping the barbarians in a heap.

  “Now!” cried a monk far to Giavno’s right, and he turned to regard the men there on the wall. Using the distraction of the commotion outside, they sprang up as one and hurled a volley of stones down at the piled barbarians, scoring many solid hits. The Alpinadoran attackers at the base of the wall withered under the barrage, their formations breaking apart and many of them retreating. They had just started to reorganize when a bolt of lightning blasted out of a lower window—Father De Guilbe’s work, no doubt.

  That proved enough to shatter the attackers’ sensibilities, and they ran off as one, though even under that terrible assault, they did not leave a single barbarian behind, not even the woman Giavno had killed and another felled by De Guilbe’s lightning bolt.

  Brother Giavno spun about and slumped down, putting his back against the cool stone of the parapet. They had won the day, he knew, but he understood, too, that this would be only the first of many such days. The brothers did not have near the firepower to break out of their chapel against so large a force, and the barbarians didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Indeed, the size of their force had confirmed the monks’ worst fears: that the many barbarian tribes of Mithranidoon had come together in common cause—something that had been unthinkable only a few hours before.

  The brothers and their servants were badly outnumbered here, and every rock and every spear they had thrown at the attackers was one less they’d have at their disposal in the next round.

  “Father De Guilbe has asked for you,” a monk who appeared at the opening back in the main keep informed Giavno.

  The weary brother nodded and hauled himself up from the stone. He glanced back at the distant barbarians to see them setting up large tents down by the beach before the dozens of boats that had brought them here.

  From the top of the wall above the main gate to the small chape
l compound, Cormack stared out at the bloodstains. Not so far away, he could see the hair and pieces of scalp of one unfortunate Alpinadoran who had caught a rock on the head. A woman, he had been told by one of the other brothers.

  He couldn’t see in much detail from this distance, but the small tuft of hair blowing in the gentle wind could well have been Milkeila’s.

  The monk resisted the urge to throw up. She could be lost to him forever. She could lie dead at the beach, her head split apart. Because she had been out there, he was certain, standing strong among her kin, standing determined that the imprisonment of the three men would not hold.

  Father De Guilbe was wrong, Cormack knew in his heart and soul. To proselytize in the name of Blessed Abelle was a good thing, but not like this, not under penalty of a dungeon cell. Even if the men in captivity agreed to recant their own faith and follow the ways of Abelle, even if they came to do so with all their hearts and souls, it would be a hollow gain for the Church, and certainly not worth this fighting.

  Cormack put his arm up on the stone railing and rested his chin in the crook of his elbow, staring helplessly at the distant tuft of hair, hoping and praying that it was not Milkeila’s.

  But even if his prayers were answered, it would do little to mitigate the realization that at least one woman, young and strong and full of pride and certainty to match Giavno’s own, had died this day who should not have.

  Not over this.

  “Brother Cormack!” He knew Giavno’s voice all too well these days. He slowly turned to face the man, trying to keep his agitation off his face.

  “The fight has ended,” Giavno said from the keep’s main door, some twenty feet back of the main gate on the surrounding wall. “Be quick to your work. We need water to wash our wounds.”

  Cormack motioned toward Giavno’s torn upper arm. “Have you been tended?”

  “I go to Father De Guilbe,” the man replied, though his voice softened in response to Cormack’s honest and obvious concern. “He will use a soul stone.”

  “Quickly,” Cormack bade him. Giavno nodded and disappeared inside the keep.

  He is a good man, Cormack reminded himself. Despite his current anger at Giavno over the barbarian prisoners, despite his rage that it had come to this—a prolonged and lethal battle and siege—Cormack understood that Giavno’s heart was good.

  But the man’s thoughts were misplaced. And if “good” men could precipitate this kind of foolish and worthless slaughter, then … The thought made Cormack grimace.

  He pulled himself up and noted the commotion inside the courtyard that surrounded the main keep, where brothers ran to and fro to shore up the wall in places where it had been damaged, or where the work on it had never been good enough to begin with. Truly even he had to appreciate the efforts of the Abellican contingent, no matter his feelings regarding their current choices and mission, for the work on this chapel fortress was remarkable to behold. They had built a circular tower keep, easily the tallest structure on the lake at more than thirty feet, and when the battling had begun those two years ago, the brothers had constructed, and so quickly, the surrounding wall, a dozen feet high in places like Cormack’s present position, the front gate, but more than twenty feet high in other areas. A series of bridges had been fashioned to traverse to those higher areas from inside the upper stories of the keep, allowing the brothers to bring in reserves quickly and efficiently wherever they might be needed.

  This had been the first true battle where the enemy had come against them in such numbers and with such ferocity, and it seemed to Cormack that the fortress had held up amazingly well.

  He scrambled down to the ground and went around to the left side of the tower, to a small and square supplementary building. From there, he opened a bulkhead and headed down a natural tunnel that had been widened by the monks, with stairs carved into the slippery and downward-sloping stone. He passed a side tunnel leading to the prisoners’ dungeon, and grimaced as he heard the shaman of the trio chanting loudly, in open defiance.

  They knew of the fighting, Cormack realized. They knew that their people had come for them.

  Cormack pulled a torch from its wall sconce and hustled along, past another corridor and down another desent, at last coming to a heavy door barred on his side with three separate iron poles. He opened two smaller hatchways on the door—one for him to peer through and a second that allowed him to thrust his torch into the cave beyond before going in. The flickering of that torchlight amplified many times over once it had passed through the portal, for this cave sat at the base of the island, just above the water level, and the floor of its lower reaches was the lake itself.

  The quick check before opening the door was more a ritual than actual security, for the brothers had done well to secure that cave as well, building a gridwork gate that allowed the fish to enter but kept out anything larger, like the fast-swimming glacial trolls.

  The warmth of the misty air washed over Cormack when he opened the door, and the smell in this cave was particularly thick with fish, for the monks had been down here angling extensively in preparation for what they knew to be a siege, and they had cleaned their catch at the water’s edge and thrown the scraps back in to attract more fish and the common crabs.

  Cormack welcomed that warmth, and the smell, hoping that he would lose himself in the heavy sensations and forget the horrific battle he had just witnessed. If he had been able to do that, he would have lingered for some time down in this sanctuary.

  But he filled several waterskins and headed right back out, and in his mind he still heard the screams, and the smell of fish had not replaced the smell of death.

  They will come again,” Father De Guilbe said to Brother Giavno. “And again after that. Stubborn lot.” “Foolish lot,” said Giavno. “Our walls are too strong!” “I appreciate your confidence, Brother,” said De Guilbe, “but we both understand that our enemies will adapt their tactics accordingly. In this first exchange we had several wounded, yourself among them.”

  “It is just a scratch,” Giavno protested. He turned his arm, presenting it to De Guilbe. Soul stone in hand, the father pressed his fingers against the wound and began praying to Blessed Abelle.

  The warmth permeated Giavno’s body, as comforting as the arms of a lover. In that magical embrace he wondered how these idiot barbarians could not understand the beauty that was Abelle. Why would they, why would anyone, not embrace the power and goodness that could afford such wondrous magic as this? Why would anyone not appreciate such healing and utility, and with the promise of everlasting life beyond this mortal coil?

  He closed his eyes and let the warmth flow through his body. He could understand the hesitance of the Samhaists, perhaps, for an embrace of Abelle would rob them of their tyrannical power hold. But not these barbarians of Alpinador—well, other than their shamans. For the average Alpinadoran, Blessed Abelle offered everything. And yet, they had rejected the monks at every turn. The men in the dungeon would rather be killed than accept Abelle! And it wasn’t just because one of them was a shaman of some high standing, Giavno knew. The other two were just as stubborn and unyielding.

  But why?

  “What is troubling you, Brother?” Father De Guilbe said, drawing Giavno from his contemplation.

  Giavno opened his eyes and only then realized that the healing session was long over, that he was holding his arm up high before him for no reason at all. He cleared his throat and straightened before the father. “I told you that it was but a minor wound,” he said.

  “What is it?” De Guilbe pressed. “Does such battle leave an evil taste in your mouth?”

  “No, I mean, well, yes, Father,” Giavno stuttered. “It seems nonsensical to me that the barbarians would throw themselves against our fortifications over such a matter. Their companions are alive only through our work with the gemstones—they cannot deny that truth. And all that we have asked in return is the acceptance of the source of that healing magic by those three.”

/>   Father De Guilbe spent a long moment staring at his second. “You have heard of the Battle of Cordon Roe?”

  Giavno nodded numbly at the preposterous question. How could anyone, let alone any Abellican, not know that cursed name? Cordon Roe was a street in Delaval City where the word of Blessed Abelle first came to the great city at the mouth of the river. The first monks of Blessed Abelle in that most populous center had set up their chapel (though it was really no more than a two-story house) on Cordon Roe and preached the words of faith.

  “What do you know of Cordon Roe, Brother?”

  “I know that the brothers who traveled there were well received by the people of Delaval City,” Giavno answered. “Their services quickly came to encompass the entirety of the street, and on some days the surrounding avenues were clogged with onlookers.”

  “It was a promising start in the early days of our Church, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Too promising,” said Father De Guilbe. “Blessed Abelle had sent the priests to that largest city in Honce not long after the word of Chapel Abelle had arrived there. They were granted entrance by the Laird Delaval, our current Laird Delaval’s grandfather, if memory serves me correctly, and indeed he proved to be their first patient, the first recipient of gemstone magic in the city, as he was afflicted with some minor but aggravating malady. So Laird Delaval granted them access and allowed them their prayers and their practices. And the people responded, as we know most will to Blessed Abelle once they have felt the power of the gemstones.”

  “And that angered the Samhaists,” Giavno said.

  Father De Guilbe nodded solemnly. “And threatened Laird Delaval himself,” he explained. “And so was the garrison of Delaval City turned upon our brethren, and Cordon Roe became a fortress within that fortress city.”