Preserved by the cold, more bodies had been stacked on the wineracks. Judging by the sigils on their mail, they were the Perdon’s captains. Here, however, they hadn’t been simply piled up like lumber. Instead, the bodies had been arranged in grotesque and degrading postures, as if death had caught them in a devils’ dance, abusing themselves, copulating with each other, performing intricate atrocities. The shadows cast by the motion of the lamps gave the impression that the men were still alive, yearning toward a last taste of pleasure or pain.
On the corkage table in the middle of the cellar lay the Perdon himself.
Terisa recognized his bald pate, his red, thick eyebrows, his stained and shaggy moustache, his hairy ears; she recognized the passion in his glazed, staring eyes. It would have been impossible for her to mistake the man who had once helped Prince Kragen and Artagel save her from Gart.
The way he had died sickened her to the bottom of her heart.
His limbs and torso were cross-hatched with cuts, but none of them had caused his death. No, an honest end in battle apparently wasn’t satisfactory for an enemy of Cadwal, a man who had pitted himself against High King Festten all his life. The Perdon had been killed by a corkscrew driven between his teeth through the back of his throat into the wooden table, so that he lay pinned there until he drowned on his own blood.
Passing out had advantages, no question about it. Oblivion might give Terisa the comfort she craved, if she could fade into it and never come back.
At the same time, she was so angry that when she bit down her lip to keep herself quiet she drew blood.
White with strain and horror, Geraden wheeled on the nearest guard. “Where’s Nyle?”
“Not here,” the guard answered thickly. “Unless he’s one of the bodies. No one’s here.” A moment later, he added, “None of the rooms down here was used for a cell.”
Then someone bumped Terisa so hard that she stumbled. The Tor brushed past without noticing her, shouldered Prince Kragen aside to approach the corkage table.
For a long moment while everyone watched him, he slumped against the edge of the table; the courage and determination seemed to leak out of him, as if he were sinking in on himself like a deflated bladder.
“Oh, my old friend. My old friend.”
In a constricted voice, Geraden muttered, “He was never here. You were never here.” Apparently, he was talking to Terisa. “We all made the same assumption, but we were wrong. When High King Festten came here, he had to kill Esmerel’s servants and maybe even Eremis’ relatives to get into the house. Eremis hasn’t used this place for years.”
Abruptly, the Tor raised his head and brought up a wail like the cry of his damaged guts. Terisa was behind him: she couldn’t see what he was doing. She didn’t realize what he had done until a terrible convulsion shook him from head to foot and then his fight fist sprang into the air, brandishing the corkscrew which had killed the Perdon.
As if he had no idea what was going on around him, Geraden muttered, “We’ve come to the wrong place. This is just a trap. It doesn’t even give us a chance to strike back.”
With a tearing groan, the Tor lifted the Perdon’s rigid corpse. When he turned, Terisa saw that his face was streaked with tears. In the lamplight, he looked as pallid as the dead.
“And you wanted to make an alliance with that monster,” he cried to his friend’s body. But he didn’t expect an answer. Jerking his head at the ceiling, he shouted suddenly, “Are you laughing at him now, Eremis? Does it amuse you to do this to a man who believed you?”
Oh, Eremis was laughing, all right. Terisa was sure of it.
Dumbly, she went to the Tor’s side and helped support his quivering arms until Ribuld and some of the other guards came to take the Perdon away.
When she and Geraden went back outside, they found that the weather had turned to snow.
The air was as dark as evening, prematurely dim: the snow fell so thickly that it swallowed the light. Swirling inside the walls of the valley, it blanketed the atmosphere until she couldn’t see five feet past the edge of the portico – a snowfall as heavy and thorough as a torrent, and yet composed of delicate, dry flakes, bits of powder so fine they stung the skin. The guards at the door had lit torches which the snow smothered as soon as they left the shelter of the portico. Everyone else in the valley, twelve thousand fighting men, had been erased from sight. Already the white cold accumulating on the ground was two or three inches thick.
Terisa shivered with a chill that felt almost metaphysical. She had dreamed once of snow; and because of that dream she had accepted Geraden’s invitation to leave her old life behind.
With Castellan Norge and Master Barsonage, Prince Kragen came out of the house, gusting curses. “By the stars,” he growled, “if this snow does not blind our enemies as it does us, we are dead men. As matters stand, we will be hard pressed to locate our own encampment.”
Norge struggled to recover his essential equanimity. “I think we should do that right away, my lord Prince. If we don’t, we might get stuck here for the night. The armies need us. And I can’t ask my guards to stay with that many corpses.”
The Prince nodded. “I will instruct men to string lines to keep the horses together.” Followed by his soldiers, he strode away into the snowfall and disappeared as if the flakes swept his reality away.
Rather aimlessly, Norge commented, “The Tor is resting. I’ll go get him. But I don’t think he’ll be able to ride.”
No one answered. Scowling uncharacteristically, the Castellan went back into the manor.
Master Barsonage cleared his throat. “It was a natural mistake, Geraden. We all made it. What do we know of Master Eremis, but that Esmerel is his ancestral home? What is more reasonable than the assumption that he built his power here – held his prisoners here?”
“Yes, it was reasonable,” Geraden said in a bleak tone.
“No, it wasn’t.” Terisa hadn’t intended to speak; she didn’t know what she was going to say until she said it. “King Joyse told me to think.” Her mind was full of the Perdon and the Tor, and the implications of snow. “Esmerel was too obvious.
“We had to come here. We didn’t know where else to go. But we should have known he wouldn’t be here.”
“And now we’re stuck,” Geraden finished.
No one argued with him.
Guards brought horses up to the portico. The mounts already had snow caked in their manes, on their withers; the flakes were so thick and cold that the horses’ heat turned them to ice as they melted. But the wind kept the hoods and shoulders of the guards clear.
Men began to file out of the house. After a while, Castellan Norge and Ribuld brought the Tor to the portico. Physically, the old lord had never looked worse. His limbs were as frail as a child’s; his hands shook as if the chill had already reached his bones; his skin was the color of moldy potatoes.
Nevertheless the glare in his eyes was unquenchable. His outrage at what had been done to the Perdon sustained him when his body and his ordinary courage failed.
As long as she ignored the rest of him and watched only his eyes, Terisa was able to keep her grasp on hope.
Norge was right: the Tor couldn’t bear to be mounted again. But Ribuld stayed with him, and the Castellan assigned other guards to his side; shuffling heavily, he moved away into the snow. Like Prince Kragen, he seemed to vanish from the world almost immediately.
At a word from Norge, Terisa, Geraden, and Master Barsonage climbed onto their beasts. Led by guards who were connected with lines to other guards, invisible in the impenetrable snowfall, they rode away from Esmerel to search for their encampment.
Swirling snowflakes burned her eyes. They prickled on her cheeks like bits of premonition; hints sharp enough to cut, cold enough to numb the damage they did.
Despite the caution of the riders, they reached their part of the camp sooner than she would have believed possible. The men of Orison and the Alend soldiers had laid out a protected p
osition for their commanders near Esmerel and the head of the valley, away from the exposed foot of the wedge; so Terisa and Geraden, Master Barsonage and Castellan Norge didn’t have as far to go as the rest of the guards. And tents had already been set up for them: Master Harpool and his companion had apparently been at work with their mirrors for some time, translating equipment and supplies from Orison.
Master Barsonage and Geraden hurried to join them.
From horseback, Terisa saw bonfires and torches around her, some of them as much as twenty or thirty feet away. Maybe the snowfall was thinning. Even so, it was at least four or five inches deep. And – unless her sense of time had failed completely – sunset was still an hour or so away. Even if the snowfall was thinning, there might be a foot or more on the ground before night.
A guard urged her to dismount and enter a large tent which had been raised for the Tor and Castellan Norge; but she stayed where she was, trying to read the suggestions in the snow, until the Tor himself reached the camp. Then she got down and went with him into shelter.
A servant took his cloak, then brought food and wine, which the old lord rejected with a grimace. Supported by Ribuld and another guard, he lowered himself into a camp chair. He had snow in his eyebrows, snow on his head. His cheeks were the color of worn out ice. Ribuld knelt in front of him, offered to pull off his boots; he declined that comfort as well. “I must go out again soon,” he murmured. “There is no escaping it.”
“My lord Tor,” Ribuld said in a tone Terisa hadn’t heard him use since Argus’ death, “you don’t need to go out. Prince Kragen and Castellan Norge will come to you.”
“Ah, true,” sighed the Tor. “But if I remain here, who will give the King’s guard my blessing? I must visit every campfire tonight, every squadron, so that every man will know his bravery is valued and his loyalty, precious.
“No, Ribuld, I will wear my boots. I do not mean to take them off again.”
Ribuld bowed and withdrew to stand with Terisa. Around his scar, the veteran’s face was tight with unexpected grief.
“Ribuld—?” she tried to ask; but she couldn’t find the words she wanted. All she knew about him was that he had been Argus’ friend; he liked and served Artagel; he seemed to enjoy suggestive conversation. And he had killed Saddith to save Lebbick. He would have saved Lebbick from Gart, if he could.
“My lady,” he said, almost snarling to control himself, “my home’s in the Care of Tor. Not far from Marshalt. I fought for the Tor – that’s how he knows my name – and for the Perdon, too, before I joined the King’s guard.” He looked at her as if, like her, he couldn’t find the right words.
Maybe she understood. “Take good care of him,” she replied softly. “He needs you more than Geraden and I do.”
The twist of Ribuld’s expression could have meant anything.
Terisa left the tent and went to see if Master Harpool required help.
As she and the Masters finished translating the last of the tents and bedrolls, the snowfall abruptly lessened. She felt cold to the bone; her face was wet and numb; her fingertips left trails of moisture down the frame of Master Harpool’s glass. Nevertheless the easing of the snow caught at her attention like a call of horns—
—the call for which her heart had always been waiting.
She jerked her back straight, lifted her head, spun around before anyone else noticed the change.
Yes. Blowing down from the head of the valley, the wind parted the snow like curtains, let the gray light of early evening through the clouds. As if without transition, Esmerel and the valley became a winter landscape before twilight, a scene which needed only sunshine to reveal its surprising beauty.
Perhaps the horns – and those who sounded them – were on the far side: the far side of the manor, where the defile brought the brook gamboling over its ice into the valley.
Now Geraden joined her, looked around. Several of the Masters breathed thanks that the snow was stopping. Guards expressed the same sentiment less delicately. None of them could hear the premonition in the air whetted with cold, the implication as penetrating as splinters.
“Get the Tor,” she said as if the horns had lifted her out of herself, despite the fact that she couldn’t hear them, could hardly remember them; maybe she had never heard them. “Get Prince Kragen. Tell them to hurry.”
“Terisa?” Geraden asked. “Terisa?”
She ignored him. She didn’t need reason: intuition was enough. She was fixed on Esmerel and couldn’t look away.
Master Barsonage sent Imagers into motion. Someone shouted for the Castellan. Infected by an urgency they couldn’t explain, guards began to obey, began to run. She had that much credibility with them, anyway.
Then past the snow-clogged side of the manor came charging men on horseback. As the horses fought for speed, their nostrils gusted steam, and their legs churned the snow until the dry, light flakes seemed to boil. The sides of the valley and the snow muffled every sound, but each movement was distinct, as edged as a shard of glass.
Three riders with longswords held up in their fists and keen hate in the strides of their fierce mounts. The riders she had seen in the Congery’s augury. The riders of her dream.
“Bowmen!” Norge snapped from somewhere nearby. “Be ready! We’ll pick them off as soon as they get in range.”
“No!” coughed the Tor. He had come out of his tent; he stood with his legs splayed in the snow, supported by Ribuld. “That is a traitor’s deed. Let them approach. We kill no one unless we must!”
“Well said, my lord Tor!” Prince Kragen arrived at a run, with his sword in both hands. Using the blade as a pointer, he commanded, “Look more closely!”
The light wasn’t good: at first, she couldn’t see what the Prince was pointing at. But after a moment she realized that each of the riders had a white cloth tied to the tip of his sword.
Flags of truce.
A truce, Eremis? With you?
One of the riders was certainly Master Eremis: that was unmistakable. He drove his mount plunging forward with an air of jaunty peril, as if he were in the grip of an exquisite and unutterable joy.
Beside him came Master Gilbur, hunchbacked and murderous.
The third man she didn’t know by sight. Nevertheless she was sure of him. The arch-Imager Vagel. A relatively small man, at least compared to Eremis and Gilbur; dwarfed by his charger. Lank gray hair fluttered from his skull. He rode with his toothless mouth open like the entrance to a pit.
The riders of her dream.
“The gall of those bastards,” someone whispered. Ribuld? “The gall.”
Abruptly, Gilbur and Vagel hauled on their reins, wrenched their horses to a halt. Just beyond reliable bow-range, they wheeled and stamped, waiting.
Master Eremis came forward as if he feared nothing. Intensely nonchalant, he approached his enemies.
There he stopped.
“My lord Prince.” His tone was full of secret laughter. “My lord Tor. Master Barsonage. Terisa and Geraden. How fortuitous that you are all here together.”
The Tor leaned on Ribuld as if he had lost the power of speech. Geraden scowled intently, concentrating not on anger but on the ramifications of Master Eremis’ presence. Terisa faced the tall Imager and felt the blood congeal in her chest.
“We are not patient with traitors,” snapped Prince Kragen: he was the Alend Contender, accustomed to authority. “Tell us what you want and be done with it.”
Master Eremis paid no attention to that demand. “My companions fear you,” he said. “They believe you will kill them if they come near, despite our flags of truce.”
Prince Kragen snorted. “That would be an action worthy of you, Eremis. We are not such men.”
In response, Master Eremis laughed along the wind, sent mirth and scorn across the snow. “Do you hear?” he called over his shoulder. “The Alend Contender thinks he is not such a man as we are.”
“You’re lucky Lebbick isn’t here,” muttered N
orge. “He’d castrate you first and worry about honor later.” But no one listened to him.
Spurring their horses, Master Gilbur and the arch-Imager came forward to join Master Eremis.
“Tell us what you want,” Prince Kragen repeated harshly.
“As I say,” gloated Master Eremis, “it is fortuitous that you are all here together. Because you are all here, you will be able to give me what I want. I have a requirement for each of you. Each of you except the Congery” – he sneered at Master Barsonage – “which has my permission to go sodomize itself whenever it chooses.”
Instead of retorting with threats, the mediator folded his arms on his thick chest and produced a grim smile. “Be careful what you say, Master Eremis,” he articulated. “Your insults only betray your fear.”
“Fear!” Master Gilbur waggled his sword mockingly. “The day you teach me to fear you, Barsonage, I will walk into this camp naked and let you use me however you wish.”
The Tor made a weak gesture, requesting silence. In a thin voice, he said, “You mentioned requirements, Master Eremis.”
“Indeed,” Eremis replied with a grin. “And if you satisfy me, I am willing to let you all live.”
Norge pronounced an obscenity. No one else spoke.
“By now,” the tall Imager explained, “even the thickest-headed among you must realize that we have an alliance with High King Festten. By force of Imagery and arms, we are prepared to crush you completely. We will wash the ground with your blood until you beg to share the Perdon’s fate.”
“Try it,” grated Ribuld. Again, no one else spoke.
“As it happens, however,” Master Eremis continued humorously, “the High King is not a comfortable ally. He wants to rule the world – and I intend that mastery for myself. Our ambitions are not well mated.”
“Doubtless,” the Tor sighed. “What are your requirements?”
Master Eremis straightened his legs, raised himself high in his saddle. “My lord Tor, my lord Prince, I require you to surrender.”
This time, it was Prince Kragen who laughed – a bloody and mirthless guffaw.