The Ancient

  He stepped out with his left foot suddenly, slashing the blade down low, then reversed the swing so quickly that it passed over the severed bed leg before the bed had even dropped. Now he stepped right, finishing the move as his backhand took out the other leg.

  The foot of the bed dropped as the Highwayman leaped back to the right in a twisting somersault. He came to his feet beside the bed, his back to it. Halfway up its length he continued his spin, his blade neatly severing the third leg.

  Yeslnik and Olym cried out in protest, but their initial escape route, anticipated by the Highwayman, had been lost with the collapse of the bed’s right side.

  The Highwayman let go of the sword with his right hand as he came around. As soon as he faced the bed squarely again his legs twitched, lifting him in a dive ahead and to the side. He turned his free right hand under and caught the top of the headboard, allowing him to turn about as he lifted a straight-legged somersault that ended with a sudden tuck that spun him over and a more sudden extension that landed him upright facing the bed. But only for a moment, for he dropped and slashed to the right, and the fourth and final leg fell away, dropping the full weight of the bed onto Yeslnik and Olym, mercifully muffling their annoying cries.

  The Highwayman stepped back and regarded his handiwork with a nod that reflected both surprise and satisfaction. He looked down at the small sack tied to his belt, bulging with coin and jewels, and nodded again.

  “Do remember that I did not kill you, and it would have been an easy thing,” he said to Yeslnik, bending low and peering under at the grunting and outraged man. “And do remember that I did not ravish your wife.”

  Yeslnik cursed and spat at him, but the Highwayman had perplexed himself with his own words. He leaned back to consider them and didn’t even notice the feeble insult, verbal or watery.

  “You remember that I did not ravish her,” the Highwayman clarified, looking back at Yeslnik. “I do hope that dear Lady Olym will forget that fact, for I am certain that my lack of action angers her more than anything else I might have done, murdering you included.”

  “How dare you?” Yeslnik demanded.

  “It is really quite easy,” the Highwayman assured him, and with a tap of two fingers to his forehead, he rushed away to the window.

  But darkness hadn’t fallen yet, and the upper bailey teemed with guards.

  Nearly an hour passed before Prince Yeslnik finally managed to squirm out from under the heavy bed. His howls took some time to get the attention of some servants, who at last rushed in and helped him pull the bed up enough to allow Olym to unceremoniously slither out.

  “You!” Olym screamed at her husband. She made no effort to cover herself, though more and more people were charging into the room to see what was the matter. “You fancy yourself the laird of a holding, and you cannot deal with a single thief? You are a hero among men, and yet a single, small man chases you under your wife’s bed like a frightened rabbit?” She moved to slap him, but Yeslnik caught her arm then her other one and held her fast.

  “Would you be less angry if he had ravished you?” Yeslnik asked, more an accusation than a question. Lady Olym wailed—the first sincere wail she had offered that day—and collapsed onto what was left of her bed.

  It seemed as if Yeslnik only then realized that the room was full of people, many of whom were staring at his revealed wife. “Out! Out!” he demanded, chasing them from the room. He gave a last, disgusted look at Olym and followed, ordering the guards to find the Highwayman and not return without the bastard’s severed head.

  Olym brought her hands to her face and sobbed for a long, long while as the room darkened. She was near sleep when soft lips brushed her forehead.

  “Marvelous lady,” said the Highwayman, who had never left the room. Olym’s eyes popped wide open, and she thrust herself up to her elbows to face him directly.

  “I cannot ravish a married woman, by the code of honor that guides me,” the thief graciously explained. “But I assure you that the code is sorely tried when I glimpse a creature of such beauty.” He reached up and gently stroked her face. Olym closed her eyes and swooned, falling back to the bed, her fingers kneading at the plush blankets.

  “Think of me,” the Highwayman bade her, “as I travel the wilds of the northland.”

  And then he was gone, sprinting to the window and going through so easily and swiftly that he was out before Olym had even glanced his way.

  Not to fear,” Bransen assured Callen and Cadayle the next day when they walked down the road out of Delaval, leading Doully the donkey. “For I told Lady Olym that I would be in the North.”

  “But our road is to the north,” Callen replied. “And there you will truly be.”

  “Exactly,” said Bransen and he flashed that grin, smug and disarming at the same time.

  Sure enough, Laird Delaval’s guards, at the request of Prince Yeslnik, streamed out of the city that same morning, heading south in search of the Highwayman as the Lady Olym had directed.

  TWO

  Feeding the God Well

  Samhaist Dantanna crouched low as he moved through the area of knee-deep white caribou moss. The plant could be mashed into a potent salve and made a fine tea, but Dantanna was looking for something even more valuable: dauba bulbs. They only grew among the moss, and never in great number. Even one bulb would make for a fine day’s hunting, though, for the Samhaist could then prepare the most wonderful dauba stew, a brew that would take all the pains from his joints for a week and more.

  Dantanna didn’t like this land, Alpinador, far preferring the milder climate of Vanguard, south of the mountains.

  It was not his place to question, though—at least not openly.

  He had to keep telling himself that, for there was so much afoot in the world that Dantanna, still young and not completely jaded, did indeed wish to question. He bent low and brushed aside the moss as he quickened his pace. He knew there would be some dauba around this particularly thick strand of caribou moss—there had to be.

  “That’s a bootlace, not a vine, boy,” came a gruff voice, and only then did Dantanna realize that he was not alone in the white field, though how in the world someone else had come in without gaining his attention he couldn’t begin to fathom.

  Until he looked up to see the weathered face, the thick mustache, and the pointed, feathered cap. Then he knew. The man standing tall and straight before him might have been forty or seventy—he had those ageless features that exude both strength and the wisdom of experience. So much experience.

  “Master Sequin,” he stammered, sidling back a few feet. The old scout didn’t answer other than to stare un-blinkingly and witheringly at the Samhaist. “I did not know that you were in the area,” Dantanna said.

  “Like to state the obvious, do you?”

  Dantanna nodded stupidly. “I am Samhaist Dantanna—once we met, in Vanguard and near to where the Abelli…”

  “Chapel Pellinor,” the weathered Jameston Sequin said. Dantanna nodded, trying not to look too pleased that this great man had remembered him.

  “I never forget a face,” Jameston went on. “Or the name of a man I consider worth remembering.”

  Dantanna beamed all the more.

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  The Samhaist slouched. “Dantanna.”

  “You travel with old Badden?”

  “Ancient Badden,” Dantanna corrected, and (surprisingly to him) forcefully.

  “You’re a long way from home, boy.”

  Dantanna didn’t begin to know how to take that. “There is the war …”

  “The one your Ancient Badden started.”

  “Not so!” Dantanna protested with a severity that surprised him given his ambivalence, often disgust, at the fighting over Vanguard. “Dame Gwydre began it all. She chose and chose ill.”

  “Because she fell in love with a man?”

  “Because she fell in love with an Abellican monk!”

  Jameston
Sequin chuckled and shook his head. “An offense worth all of this?” he asked.

  Dantanna half shook his head and half nodded, giving no verbal response, because he knew that if he did he would never get any true resonance or confidence in his voice.

  “Well, you fight your battles as you choose them,” Jameston said. “I’ll let the folk of Vanguard choose which religion, Samhaist or Abellican, suits their needs.”

  “And which for Jameston?” Dantanna asked, thinking himself sly for the instant it took Jameston to mock him utterly with a laugh.

  The old scout brought his arm out in front of him, holding a sack, and still applying that withering gaze over Dantanna, he upended it before the man. More than a dozen pointy troll ears tumbled out onto the ground at Dantanna’s feet.

  “It’s theirs to choose,” Jameston said.

  “As it is yours,” Dantanna replied, still staring down at the multitude of ears—ears of creatures Ancient Bad-den had enlisted in the fight.

  “If my choice is between a man and a troll, it’s not a hard one, boy,” Jameston said. “I said I didn’t much care, and I don’t, but you tell your Ancient Badden that I’m not for letting glacial trolls murder families in the name of Samhain or in the name of anyone else.”

  “Our struggle is …”

  “… none of my business,” Jameston finished for him, “and none of my care. But when I see a troll, I kill a troll, and I don’t ask who it’s working for.” He snorted derisively and started away.

  “Master Sequin,” Dantanna called after him. “If we meet again, will you remember my name?”

  Jameston didn’t stop or look back. “I forgot it already.”

  From a high perch on the very edge of the great glacier Cold’rin, Ancient Badden stared out across the miles of the southland. In his mind’s eye, he looked past the frozen tundra of Alpinador to the thick forests of Vanguard. He envisioned the battles raging there, Honce man against goblin, Honce man against glacial troll, Honce man against the sturdy Alpinadoran barbarians.

  His army, battling the men of Honce, punishing them for their growing acceptance of the heretics of Blessed Abelle.

  A smile creased Ancient Badden’s face, strangely white teeth (for one of his age) standing brightly in the midst of his wild black mustache and beard, a gigantic affair that poked out in a semicircle of sharp points beneath the old Samhaist’s weathered face, its ends sharpened by dung and plaited with ribbons black and red. He would teach them.

  Word had come that Chapel Pellinor had fallen—sacked as much by angry Honce men as by Ancient Badden’s hordes. The few surviving monks were even then being dragged north, to this place, to be sacrificed to Ancient D’no, the worm god of the frozen lands.

  Ancient Badden lowered his gaze to the clouds of steam at the base of the glacier’s cliff face, where the ice met the hot waters of the lake called Mithranidoon. The mists seemed to him to thicken. An indication, perhaps, that D’no was pleased by the news? Or his imagination, his thrill, at the prospect of feeding the god so well?

  Ancient Badden envisioned the hot waters beneath that cloud, the Holy Lake of Mithranidoon, the Rift of Samhain, the gift of the Ancient Ones to their children as a reward for their wondrous efforts here.

  A particularly sharp retort turned the old Samhaist around, to view the crevice some fifty feet north of where he stood. A pair of giants, fifteen feet tall and with shoulders as wide as the wingspan of a great eagle, rolled heavy mallets up into the air, slamming them down concurrently upon the flattened head of a battered log, a sharpened wedge that drove deeper into the glacier with every smash. Once they had driven that one down to the level of the glacier, Ancient Badden would bless the spike and prepare its end with spells and fire, that another could be placed upon it and driven down, pushing the bottom one even deeper.

  Over to the right of the giants, where the crevice was much wider and much deeper, several glacial trolls hung by their ankles, suspended beneath crossbeams by thin ropes. Their arms were weighted, forcing them into a diver’s stretch, and their wrists had been expertly cut, their thin blood dripping down into the chasm and turning into a fine, coating mist in the windy gorge. Troll blood did not freeze, and the coating of it in the crevice would prevent the melted waters from mitigating the damage to the edge of the glacier. One troll, at least one, was dead and dried out now, Ancient Badden noted, but no worries, for the wretched little beasts were as thick as hares in summer Vanguard.

  He scanned farther to the right, to the elaborate ice bridge he had magically constructed: it spanned the widest expanse of the chasm, with enough room on either side so that it would continue to allow crossing even when the rift had become as wide as intended. Ancient Badden couldn’t help but smile as his gaze moved farther to the right, to the mountain wall bordering the glacier on the east, for against that dark stone loomed Ancient Badden’s greatest work yet: his home, Devongel, a castle of crystalline ice, of elegant, winding spires and thick walls, of defensive and confusing mazes both practical and beautiful.

  His smile disappeared when he looked back to the left, over by the working giants, and noted a smaller form, dressed in the telltale light green robes of a Samhaist, though surely nothing as elaborate as Ancient Badden’s gown, decorated as it was with claws and teeth from various carnivores, and with leafy designs woven with threads green and yellow so that it looked as if the Samhaist could walk into a strand of brush and simply disappear. About his waist, Ancient Badden wore a thick red sash, tied on his right hip, with its frayed ends nearly reaching the ground. Only one Samhaist, the Ancient himself, could wear this holiest of belts, and Ancient Badden put his hand on that knot now, as the ever-annoying Priest Dantanna approached, to remind himself of that honor.

  Wearing a sour expression, Dantanna circled wide of the giants and hopped the crevice, which, ten feet out from the spike, was no more than a crack, and neared Ancient Badden with a determined stride.

  He bowed repeatedly as he covered the last dozen strides to his master, though not as quickly or as deeply as Ancient Badden would have liked.

  “You have heard of Chapel Pellinor,” Ancient Badden began.

  “Burned and with its stones scattered,” Dantanna replied, cutting off his words as if it pained him to speak them.

  “Another victory over the Abellican heretics. Does that not please you?”

  “Many men and women who were not Abellicans were killed in the fighting.”

  Ancient Badden shrugged as if it did not matter, which, of course, in the greater scheme of Samhain’s universe, it surely did not.

  “Killed by goblins and trolls and the barbarian mercenaries,” Dantanna added.

  Another shrug. “That is the way of things.”

  “Because we choose it to be! Once we battled beside the Honce men of Vanguard against the very army we now turn loose upon them.”

  “Once and not long ago, they knew their place,” said Ancient Badden. Dantanna winced and quieted, the implications hanging heavily in the air. War was general south of the Gulf of Corona, laird against laird, with Ethelbert of Entel battling for dominance against the great Delaval. In that struggle, the true emerging winner seemed to be neither of the lairds, but rather, the Abellican Church, for the monks with their magical gem-stones, powerful in both healing and destruction, had gained favor with every laird. Though possessed of magic of their own, the Samhaists could not match that Abellican availability of useful tricks.

  “They look to the south,” Dantanna dared to say after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. “The men of Vanguard see the turning tide amongst their Honce brethren.”

  “A tide turning away from us and from the Ancient Ones,” said Ancient Badden. “It is a temporary thing, you understand.”

  Dantanna didn’t reply, except that his face showed little in the way of concession.

  “The Abellican monks dazzle with their baubles,” Ancient Badden explained. “And provide comfort and even battle advantage. But they have li
ttle understanding of the proper preparations for the greater course. Death is inevitable—to lairds and to peasants. What answers might the foolish boys who follow the distorted memory of that idiot Abelle offer to mortally wounded warriors?”

  “Fewer are mortally wounded because of their work.”

  “Temporary relief! Everyone dies.”

  Dantanna shook his head. “Then perhaps we have a role to play in complement with the monks,” he said, or started to, for his voice trailed off and his eyes widened with fear as Ancient Badden put on the most fearsome scowl he had ever seen, a mask of danger and death, and the great Samhaist seemed to grow, to rise up above Dantanna, mocking him in his impotence.

  But the growth proved short-lived, and Ancient Badden settled back easily, wearing a grin—though one that seemed no less dangerous. “You would like that, would you not?” he asked.

  Dantanna tilted his head a bit, as if he did not understand.

  “If we were to find a place beside the Abellicans,” Ancient Badden clarified.

  Dantanna began to shake his head, and his eyes darted about as if he was looking for a way to flee.

  “How long did you think you could hide your allegiance to Dame Gwydre?” Ancient Badden bluntly asked.

  “I know not of what you speak.”

  “Do not play me for a fool,” Ancient Badden warned. “You counseled Gwydre extensively before her association with the Abellicans.”

  “Ancient, the Abellicans have been in Vanguard Town for years—before I ever came to know Lady Gwydre. Indeed, they were beside Laird Gendron before his death, when Gwydre was but a girl.”

  “With all their magical baubles, they still did not prevent his untimely death, did they?” Ancient Badden gave a little laugh. Dantanna winced, for it was widely rumored that the Samhaists had played a role in the “accident” that had taken the beloved Laird Gendron from the folk of Vanguard.