Sir Farace had been replaced by an idiot, a terrified, drooling victim of some disease that had crippled both brain and body.
Ragnarson had anticipated the action. Vodicka had done the same in other wars. He ignored the man, concentrated on the “advisers.”
They were too studiedly disinterested. He locked gazes with a hawk-nosed veteran who wore a mouth-corner scarthat drew his lips into a permanent smirk.
Smirk-mouth’s eyes flicked, for the scantest instant, to the man who was to provide his diversion...
Ragnarson spurred the Cerny. His right hand, already low, yanked the throwing knife from his boot, snapped it at Scar-mouth’s throat. The Queen, no longer masked, discharged the crossbow into the chest of a second rider while all eyes remained on Bragi. His party produced their weapons and surrounded her. Before the startled Volstokiners, unprepared for their allies’ treachery, recovered, Bragi had gotten round their flank. There he met a third adviser in a flurry of swordplay, unhorsed him, and faced the Volstokiners as they turned to run.
The mixup was brief. Bragi lost one man. The other party lost five before they surrendered.
Ragnarson dismounted, removed his ax from his wargear, separated Scar-mouth’s head from his body. He handed it to the idiot. “Tell Vodicka this’s the game I play with treachers. Tell him I say he’s a coward, a baseborn whoreson who sends assassins after people he’s too craven to face himself.”
“We better get out of here,” said one of Bragi’s men.
“Yeah.” He scrambled onto the Cerny.
While they watched Sir Andvbur’s men skirmish with Volstokiners who had come out to aid their fellows, Bragi told the Queen, “You look ill. He would’ve killed you.”
“It’s not that. I’ve seen men die... The head...”
“Didn’t give me any joy either. But gruesome doings sometimes save lives.”
“I know. 1 understand. But that doesn’t make me like it.”
His own stomach was in poor shape.
The skirmishing died away. After transferring his gear to a fresh horse, Ragnarson mounted, said, “Time for the next phase.” He took a Royal standard from a bearer, spurred downhill.’’
He went at a trot, carefully studying the ground and distant ramparts. He went to a canter, then, at bowshot, to a gallop. Volstokiners watched in surprise as he spurred past their earthworks, shouting insults at Vodicka. A few desultory arrows reached for him.
One whirred past his nose. He laughed like one of the battle-crazy berserker heroes of his boyhood homeland. His hair and beard whipped with the speed of the horse’s passage. He hadn’t felt such exhilaration in years.
He stopped beyond bowshot and waited. Then his high spirits got the better of him. He made a second passage, this time planting the Queen’s standard on a mound near Vodicka’s gate.
“You’re mad!” the Queen cried, when he returned for a fresh mount. “Completely insane!” But she was laughing. And there was a new, more promising sparkle in her eyes.
“He’s got to come out now. Or admit he’s a coward to his whole army.”
“He’ll come in full knight’s regalia,” said Sir Andvbur, who had grabbed an opportunity to put himself near the Queen. “You won’t be able to handle him...”
His spirits still soared. “Watch me!” Despite the cold, he shed garments till he was down to basic Trolledyngjan war gear. He hung helmet, shield, and sword on his horse, then ran into the woods where a Guard’s infantry company lay hidden. He returned with a long pike.
“What you got to do,” he explained, “is outgut them. When they know you’re easy meat, but you stand your ground and grin, they get nervous. And make mistakes.”
He realized he was showing off, but what he saw in the Queen’s eyes made rational behavior impossible.
He rode to the meeting point, dismounted, planted a fresh standard, walked twenty paces downslope, leaned on the pike.
Trumpets winded. The encampment gate opened. A knight came forth.
This time Ragnarson faced Vodicka. He continued leaning on the pike, motionless. The horseman trotted back and forth, getting the feel of the earth, then rode uphill and stopped a hundred yards away.
As Ragnarson examined that mass of blood and steel, weighing nearly a ton and a half, he began to doubt. The horse was as protected as its rider.
Bragi continued leaning as if bored. He was commit-ted.
Vodicka wasted no time talking. He couched his lance and charged.
The King’s horse began to loom castle-huge. Bragi dropped to one knee, set his pike, lifted his shield. Could he hold each solidly enough?
He had made a major miscalculation. Vodicka’s lance outreached his pike.
He shifted slightly, was unable to finish before impact.
Vodicka came in with his lancehead aimed at Ragnarson’s chest, intending to blast him off the pike and finish him with his sword.
Bragi twisted his shield and pushed, to deflect the lance.
It ripped through his shield, down the underside of his forearm. Its impetus bore him over backward. But his right arm and hand remained oak-firm for the instant needed to bring Vodicka to grief. The pike head met the horse at the juncture of shoulder and breastplate. The screaming beast’s momentum levered it into the air.
Ragnarson’s sprawl forced Vodicka’s lancehead into the earth.
Rearing horse and levering lance separated Vodicka from his saddle. As Ragnarson scrambled away, Vol-stokin’s King landed with a horrendous clangor. Bragi was on him instantly, swordtip at the slot in the man’s visor.
“Yield!”
“Kill me,” muffled, weak.
Ragnarson glanced toward Vodicka’s encampment. No rescue mission yet. He wrestled the helmet free. Yes, he had caught the genuine fish. He punched the King’s jaw.
“Ouch!” He kissed his knuckles, with a knife cut the straps and laces holding Vodicka’s armor. He finished barely in time to get uphill ahead of a band of would-be rescuers.
“He’s in bad shape,” Ragnarson told the Queen as he rode up. “Better get him to a doctor. To the palace. Won’t be worth a farthing dead. Somebody find me some bandages.”
While men dragged Vodicka away, the Queen took Ragnarson’s hand. “For a minute I thought...”
“So did I. I’ll grow up one of these days.” Examining his arm, he found no major veins severed. A surgeon put a field dressing on, told him to avoid exertion for a fewdays.
“Sir Andvbur,” he said, “begin the next phase. The knight’s men began pushing earthworks forward.
TWELVE: Complications and New Directions
I) Recovery and preparation
Volstokin’s army fell apart. Man by man, then by companies, Vodicka’s soldiers surrendered their weap-ons, and began the walk home. Within a week the encampment was deserted-except for El Murid’s advisers and a few high officers. Ragnarson withdrew to the capital. Blackfang and the Trolledyngjans finished the job.
Pledges of fealty flooded in, especially from the provinces wasted. From Walsoken, Trautwein, Orth-wein, and Uhlmansiek the response was spotty. From Loncaric and the Galmiches there was a forbidding silence. From Savernake they expected nothing, and nothing was what they got.
Rumors from the east had winged men soaring the cold winter nights,” flitting from castle to castle.
Kavelin had two small industrial regions, the Sieges of Breidenbach and Fahrig. Breidenbach served the mines of the Galmiches, Loncaric, and Savernake. The Royal Mint was located there. To secure this, and as an experiment, Ragnarson sent Sir Andvbur Kimberlin north-across Low Galmiche.
Militarily, Fahrig was more important. It lay at theheart of iron-rich Forbeck, and received ores from Uhlmansiek and Savernake as well. It was there Kavelin’s iron and steel were made, and weapons and armor forged.
Both Sieges were heavily Wesson. The Queen would find support there.
Forbeck and Fahrig became Ragnarson’s pet winter project. Securing them would not only insure his wea
pons supply, it would split the still rebellious provinces into two groups. The southern tier were comparatively weak.
They had gotten numerous declarations of fealty out of Forbeck, mostly from lesser nobles whose fortunes depended on open trade routes. The great landholders favored the Captal’s pretender.
While Ragnarson studied, pondered, maneuvered his troops through the Siege of Vorgreberg, made requests and recommendations, and wished he controlled some means of communication as swift as the Captal’s, the Queen put in eighteen-hour days trying to rebuild a shattered hierarchy. There were banishments and outlaw-ries, and instruments of social import, each bitterly resisted in council.
Most resisted was confirmation of Ragnarson’s bargain with the aldermen of Sedlmayr. On confirmation, Sedlmayr sent Colonels Kiriakos and Phiambolos and six hundred skilled arbalesters to Vorgreberg, and raised levies to pacify Walsoken.
Another edict guaranteed certain rights of free men, especially Wessons.
Even for serfs there was a new right. One son in each family would be permitted to leave the land for service with the Crown. For Kavelin, with its traditional class rigidities, this was a revolutionary device for social mobility.
Though they moaned, the Nordmen yielded little there. The chaos in the west had separated countless serfs from their masters. Many had become robbers and brigands. The device would bring them out of outlawry.
Men began filtering into the Siege.
Responsibilities went with rights. Ragnarson, slyly, injected into the decrees the concept of every man a soldier in defense of his own. Each adult male was ordered to obtain and learn to use a sword.
He was surprised how easily that slipped past the Ministers. Men with swords stood a little taller, stopped being unquestioning instruments of their lords’ wills.
Two months passed. Warnecke came into the fold. Vodicka became the dour, grimly silent tenant of a tower shared with a manservant sent him by Sir Farace. The Wessons of Fahrig hinted interest in a charter like Sedlmayr’s. Rolf Preshka’s health deteriorated till he spent most of his time in bed. Turran and Valther disappeared. But their hands could be seen. The winter in the lowlands was unusually mild. In the high country it was bitter beyond memory. Sir Andvbur occupied Breidenbach. And Bragi spent more and more time in the field, drilling his forces in the southeastern portion of the Siege.
One blustery morning his engineers threw a pontoon across the Spehe to the Gudbrandsdal. He invaded Forbeck.
II) Ghost hunting.
Mocker huddled between buildings in Timpe, a minor city in Volstokin, cursing the weather and his own ill fortune. He had been in the kingdom two months and had yet to uncover a hint of Haroun’s whereabouts. The warmest trail hadn’t been hot since autumn. A few guerrillas remained, but the big man had vanished.
A ragged party of soldiers appeared, returning from Kavelin. They exchanged bitter words with people in the streets. Mocker retreated to deeper shadows. No point giving foul tempers’a scapegoat.
“Well,” said a voice from the darkness, softly, “see what the hounds have flushed.”
One hand darting beneath his robes for a dagger, Mocker looked around. He saw no one. “Haroun?”
“Could be.”
“Self, have been traipsing over half arse-end of world...”
“So I’ve heard. What’s your problem?”
Mocker tried to explain while hunting. He saw nothing but unnaturally deep shadow.
“So what’s Bragi want?” the sourceless voice de-manded. “He’s doing all right. He could make himself king.”
“Hai! Enemies thus far ground in mill of great grinder northern friend like ants in path of anteater. But now anteater comes to narrow in road where lion waits...”
“What’re you babbling about? El Murid? He won’t attack. He’s got trouble at home.”
“Woe! Know-it-all son of sand witch, spawn of mating of scorpion with open-mouthed jackass, or maybe camel, plotting like little old lady Fates, mouth always open and eyes always closed...”
“I missed something. And I’m being told to shut up long enough to hear what.”
“Hai! Is not stupid after all. O stars of night, witness. Is able to add up twos.” Carefully, wasting fewer words than usual, he told what Bragi had encountered in the Savernake Gap.
“I should’ve expected something. Always there’re complications. The gods themselves contend against me.” Angrily, “I defy them. The Fates, the gods, the thrones in Shinsan. Though the world be laid in ruin and the legions of Hell march forth from the seas, I’ll return.”
It was the oath Haroun had sworn while fleeing from Hammad al Nakir long ago.
Of all the Royal House, descendants of the Kings and Emperors of Ilkazar, only Haroun had survived to pursue a restoration. He alone had been nimble, swift, and hard enough to evade the arrows, blades, and poisons of El Murid’s assassins, to become, in exile, the guerrilla chieftain known as the King Without a Throne.
Mocker decided it was time an old, nagging question got asked. “Haroun, in case Fates serve up wicked chance with left hands, ending life of old marching companion, what of Cause? Are no successors, hey? Leaders of Royalists, yes. Grim old men in dark places, lying poisoned blades in hand for enemies of Haroun. But no sons of same to pick up swords and go on pursuing elusivecrown.
Bin Yousif laughed bitterly. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’ve taken roads walked alone, have secrets unshared. Still, if I’m gone, what do I care?
“Well, I’ve hoarded a trick or two, like a miser. Guess it’s time to spend them.”
Mocker, still trying to detect something in the darkness, was startled by a sudden wail from a few feet away. “Haroun?”
The answer was a moan of fear. The darkness faded.
Haroun was gone. Always, in recent years, it had been that way. There was no more closeness, no shared truth between them. Yet Haroun continued presuming on friendships formed in younger days.
The sounds of distress continued. Mocker pushed into the dying darkness.
He found an old beggar barely this side of death. “Demons,” the man mumbled. “Possessed by demons.”
Mocker shuddered, frowned. Haroun had found him, but he hadn’t found Haroun. From somewhere else, anywhere, by sorcery, bin Yousif had spoken through the old man. So. His old friend had been studying the dark arts.
With the best of intentions, no doubt. But Haroun’s character...
The appearance of several soldiers at the street exit, drawn by the beggar’s wails, made Mocker take to his heels.
Very dissatisfactory, he thought, his robes flying. The trip had been a waste. He should abandon everything and return to Nepanthe.
III) The night visitors
Operating armies in winter, even on Kavelin’s small scales, presented almost insuperable problems. Bragi crossed the Spehe with rations for ten days. That he entered the Gudbrandsdal was more to take advantage of game than to come at Forbeck unexpected.
He passed through the forest slowly, pursuing routes previously marked by the Marena Dimura, his men scattering to hunt. Two days passed before he allowed his patrols beyond the forest’s eastern verge.
The loyalties of the Forbeck nobility seemed propor-tional to distance from Vorgreberg. They encountered resistance only beyond Fahrig. The Nordmen there supported the Captal’s pretender.
Blackfang’s Trolledyngjans, who found the winter mild, whooped from town to castle.
After three weeks, Ragnarson passed command to Blackfang and returned to Vorgreberg.
Little had happened in his absence. An assassin, of the Harish Cult of Hammad al Nakir, had been caught climbing the castle wall. He had committed suicide before he could be questioned. Three ministers had been thrown in the dungeon. Her Majesty had coped.
He saw her briefly before retiring. She was haggard.
Deep in the night a daydream came true, something he had both wanted and feared.
At a touch he suddenly sat upright in darkness. His ca
ndle was out. He grabbed for the dagger beside it.
A hand pushed against his chest. A woman’s hand. “What?...” he rumbled.
A barely audible “Shh!” He lay back. Fabric rustled as clothing fell. Long, slim nakedness slid in beside him. Arms surrounded him. Small, firm breasts pressed against his chest. Hungry lips found his...
Next morning he was still unsure it hadn’t been a dream. There was no evidence save his own satiation. And the Queen seemed unchanged.
Had it been someone else? Her maidservant, Maighen, whose flirting eyes had long made her willingness evident? But Maighen was a plumpish Wesson with breasts like pillows.
Each night the mystery compounded itself, though she came earlier and earlier and stayed longer and longer.
The day Haaken sent word of the surrender of the last rebels in Forbeck, Gjerdrum asked, “What’re you doing nights, anyway?”
Ragnarson flashed a guilty look. “A lot of worrying. How do you beat sorcery without sorcery?”
Gjerdrum shrugged.
All questions had their answers. Sometimes they weren’t pleasant; sometimes the circumstances of resolu-tion were distressing.
The latter was the case the night Bragi unraveled the mystery of his lover’s identity.
The first scream barely penetrated his passion. The second, cut off, grabbed like the hand of a clawed demon.
It had come from the Queen’s chambers.
He grabbed his weapons and, naked, charged up the corridor.
The guards before the Queen’s door lay in a heap. Blood trickled over the edge of the balcony to the floor below.
Ragnarson hit the door, broke the lock, charged through. He roared into the Royal bedchamber in time to seize a man trying to force himself through a window. He clapped the man’s temple, knocked him out.
Ragnarson turned to the Queen’s bed. Maighen. And over her now, clenched fist at her mouth, the Queen herself, naked. A dagger protruded from Maighen’s throat.
Despite the situation, his eyes roamed a body he had known only by touch. She reddened.