The weak always panicked. They were chaff, fated to be cast to the winds.
Folk walked abroad, calling and crying in the half light. Soldiers marched toward the walls, fastening on thick leather coats as they hurried. One dropped his spear and got kicked for his pains as he stumbled back to pick it up.
“Move! Move!”
Goats bawled from a courtyard. A horse neighed, and was answered by other nags. All over the town, dogs set up a wild clamor, howling and barking and yipping as though their ears hurt them.
Stairs set into the wall had to be climbed, and her feet ached and her back complained, but she mounted them step by step without uttering a word. Falco walked two steps behind. On the wall walk the queen leaned out, staring south. Her cloak billowed in the dawn breeze lifting out of the southeast. She was alone, but as Antonia reached the walk, she saw Lord Alexandros pacing back from the corner tower; he was too far away for her to see his face. The queen was drawn and anguished, and she clutched Antonia’s hand as soon as the skopos drew near.
“What are we to do? What are we to do?”
“Hush, Your Majesty. You are overwrought.”
“Look!”
Look!
In ancient days the Enemy whispered in the hearts of men, and men listened to these lies and found themselves so swollen with vile cravings that they bred with animals. This congress engendered monsters so grotesque in form and hideous in spirit that God flensed the Earth with a vast and terrible storm to drive the beasts forever out of the mortal world. So was it written in the Holy Verses.
How the world had fallen! What was once banished by God’s pure and righteous power walked abroad again at the behest of the Enemy. The gates of the Pit had opened and disgorged foul creatures. No doubt they had crawled north out of the stinking wasteland that had once been the lush and bountiful plain of Dar.
“There are so many,” said Adelheid.
The monsters waited in silence. They wore armor and carried spears and swords and shields. Like animals, they strayed side to side, unable to hold firm ranks, but they walked on two feet in a mockery of humankind.
Alexandros swept up beside them. “I have a count obtained from a circuit of the walls. Fifteen centuries, more or less. In the old days I would call that a small force, easily beaten. If we arm every man in Novomo, we will outnumber them. They have miscalculated. They are too few.”
“What are they?” Adelheid asked.
“Monsters,” said Antonia. “Creatures of the Enemy. Abominations.”
“They’re human, wearing animal masks,” said Alexandros, squinting his eye as he surveyed the besieging force. “They don’t have numbers enough to hold a siege, so we should be able to send for help.”
“Who will help us?” Adelheid asked.
“Folk must rally to support their skopos,” said Antonia.
The sight of so many warped faces—even if they were masks—nauseated her. Her throat burned.
In front of the walls sprawled the corpses of folk who had tried to flee the onslaught but had not reached the gates in time.
“If Novomo falls, they’ll go on to attack others,” said Alexandros, as if he had not heard her. “You must appeal to self-interest. Those who aid us, aid themselves. If they do not aid us, they are themselves fated to fall to this army.”
“It’s true.” Adelheid’s hunched shoulders straightened a little as she took heart from his considered words. “We must appoint messengers to ride as swiftly as they can.”
“Immediately,” said the general. He called Captain Falco, and the order was given and men sent running. “We’ll send a second batch at nightfall. Meanwhile, your stewards must take control of all grain stores within the walls, and every well or cistern. A strict ration will be applied. Any who violate the law will be killed.”
“Cast out,” said Adelheid. “To the mercy of our enemy.”
He nodded approvingly. “Yes, that is better.” He gestured toward the corpses tumbled here and there in the fields around Novomo. A man lay on his back on the road.
A woman had fallen on her side, trying to protect a child, who was also dead. “They seem not to be taking prisoners or slaves.”
Antonia watched this interplay, knowing herself ignored and dismissed. She fumed, but the general had captured Adelheid’s attention and, increasingly, the queen ignored her, who ought to be first in her thoughts. Even the child liked him!
“From what direction did they come?” she asked.
“What do the guards on the wall say?” Adelheid asked the general, not looking at Antonia.
“From the southern road, out of the twilight before dawn. The watch say they saw sparks rise on the hill, a weaving of light, for half the night.”
“Impossible!” cried Antonia so forcibly that both turned to regard her with surprise. “Clouds still conceal the sky. No one can weave the crowns if they cannot see the stars.”
“Why do the guards tell me this tale, then?” he asked her.
“At night any manner of wisp may be seen, sometimes illusion drawn by the eye and sometimes a phantom called up by the Enemy to lure weak-minded folk to their doom.”
“Yet here they are.” Alexandros waved toward the massed army still shifting and moving as ranks filed away from the road to encircle the walls. “They will mass the main part of the force here before the gates. A thinner line will be deployed to watch, and to defend against skirmishes around the rest of the town. That is what I would do.”
“If none come to our aid,” said Adelheid, “what can we do to defeat them?”
“I will think,” he said, and the queen smiled at him, hearing confidence in his words. Even Antonia was swayed. He had seen many years of war, and although he was an Arethousan and therefore untrustworthy, he was also trapped and might be expected to fight as a cornered lion.
In the east, a strange light rose along the hills, a color like that of blood diluted until it runs pink. Guards along the wall pointed, and a murmur swept the men standing nearby as they—as all of them—stared at a thing they had not seen for months and had come to believe might never appear again.
“That is the sun!” cried Adelheid. “An omen, surely!”
The clouds had thinned to nothing at the eastern horizon, and the sun flashed as its rim breached the horizon. South, a haze veiled the lowlands. North, the rising hills turned from black to gray as light swept the heavens. Above, it was still cloudy, but all around, folk wept to see the sun.
Antonia blinked, reminded of the day she had walked free at long last from the prison beneath the rock of Ekatarina’s Convent, where she had been held. As she grimaced, shading her eyes, it seemed her vision sharpened. It seemed she saw a golden wheel moving off the road and into place along a low rise where grapevines were trained along rail fences. It seemed a man with a human mask for a face rode alongside the turning wheel. She knew him, although in truth he was too distant for her to make out his features.
“That is Hugh of Austra,” she said, finding that her voice was cold and her heart hot. “He has betrayed us.”
The name was only an abstraction to Lord General Alexandros, but Adelheid wept fiercely and then, as the storm passed, set her fists on the wall and stared as if her gaze were killing arrows. No one in that army fell, but movement rippled within the distant ranks surrounding the golden wheel and a person came running out of their ranks toward the gate.
“Hold! Let them approach!” called Alexandros.
The call was repeated along the wall.
A bedraggled, frightened man stumbled up to the gates. His tunic was ripped and dirty. He had blood on his cheeks and he cradled his right arm in his left hand.
“Let me in, I pray you!” he shrieked. He was obviously a local farmer, scared out of his wits and in pain. “I beg you! They spared me only so I could bring a message.”
“It’s a trick,” said Adelheid. “They want us to open the gates. They believe we will be merciful. Kill him.”
Alexandr
os signaled with a hand, and a dozen archers raised their bows and sighted.
“What message?” called the captain of the watch.
“Just this.” The man sobbed hoarsely, and for a moment Antonia thought he would be unable to talk, but fear goaded him. He croaked out a muddled speech. “The ones … the Lost Ones they call themselves, come home, they say. Ai, God! God have mercy! Let me in, I pray you!”
“The message!” called the captain.
“Just this. Ai, God!” A glance over his shoulder proved him terrified. He huddled on his knees and stretched his hands toward the soldiers half seen on the wall. “That one, they call her who wears the feathered cloak, she is the leader among them. She is mother to a field of blood. So we see! So we see! All my kinfolk slaughtered …” He choked on his weeping. He collapsed forward onto his hands. To the south, past the hill on which stood the stone crown, smoke rose from a dozen conflagrations as the enemy moved out across the countryside.
“Sanglant!” muttered Adelheid. “These are his allies! His kinfolk!”
“Blood calls to blood,” said Antonia. “Evil begets evil. He could never be trusted, after all.”
The farmer struggled up to his knees, looking back again as though he expected the minions of the Enemy to ride down upon him. And were they not there, in truth? The Lost Ones had been banished from Earth because they were the creatures of the Enemy, and now the allies of the Enemy had collaborated in their return.
“Let me speak!” he gasped. “Let me in, I pray you. Help me!”
“Your message,” repeated the captain. The archers had not shifted position. They were ready to loose.
“The feathered cloak sends this message. She wants peace between your kind and hers.”
A few guardsmen snickered, but most held to silence.
“She wants peace, but she comes with a demand. Peace, between you, in exchange for one person.” He trembled and coughed. He could, it seemed, barely scrounge up enough courage to go on. “The Holy Mother! She says, peace in exchange for the Holy Mother, who is a foul sorcerer and must be laid into death.” He bawled and pounded fists on the ground. “Forgive me! I pray you! I am only sent to speak the words. Help me!”
“She fears the galla,” said Adelheid. “But how comes she to know of them?” She turned to Antonia, and her frown was fearful and her bright eyes stricken with a kind of wildness. “How is Hugh of Austra still alive? You told me that he must be dead!”
“He can still be killed,” said Antonia. “Give me a prisoner, some man who deserves death. Let me raise a galla! He is so close. He cannot avoid the Abyss, not now. Not here.”
“Is this wise?” asked Alexandros. “A fearful thing, to kill a helpless man in front of the soldiers.”
Adelheid nodded. “A fearful thing, indeed. The enemy will see what we are capable of. That will make them fear us!”
Below, the farmer at the gates wept and pleaded, creeping forward to pound at the closed gates. Adelheid called one of her sergeants, and he was sent to roust a prisoner out of the dungeon. As they waited, the sun rose and slipped behind the skin of clouds running along the horizon. The light changed to a high sheen like the reflection of lamplight off pearls, something higher than the dull gray of a cloudy day but less than direct sunlight. Still, it heartened Antonia that they had been dazzled even for so short a time. Wind and time and tide must wear away the veil of clouds, just as in the end evil is ground down by the weight of God’s justice.
“What would you have us do with the messenger, Your Majesty?” asked the sergeant of the watch, sent by the captain to inquire.
“Do not open the gates,” Adelheid said.
Alexandros said, “Leave him below. Then we can see what these Lost Ones do. If they kill him. If they spare him. If they ignore him. By their action, they speak to us of their nature and their plan.”
The Lost Ones only waited, arrayed in ranks as they watched the walls and waited for a response.
The sergeant returned leading a wary, filthy prisoner, the worst sort of scum, a man with an unkempt beard and a rotten smell to him, unwashed, toothless, and pestered by flies and fleas. He’d scratched his arms raw in patches, and he could barely shuffle on bandy legs. With the butt of his spear, the sergeant forced him to his knees, and he whimpered, too weak to fight and too stupid to beg for mercy. But he was still living, and the living possessed the blood of life.
She always carried a knife on her. She never went anywhere without it. “Step back, and avert your gaze. All of you!”
“Yes, Holy Mother.” The soldiers spoke with gratifying respect, and they moved away obediently.
Adelheid turned her back, but Alexandros only took a pair of steps to one side without looking away. No doubt he had seen worse things in the east, since the Arethousans were known to have a wicked lust for tormenting their captured enemies.
A knife is a fine and beautiful tool that can grant life or deal death with a single thrust. She knelt beside the man, whose fetid stink almost overwhelmed her until she closed her mind to it. She turned her face away and took in a deep breath of cleaner air and, turning back, shoved the blade up between his ribs.
He made a gurgling sound, and sagged, but her arms were strong enough to hold him and she had breath with which to speak.
“Ahala shin ah rish amurru galla ashir ah luhish. Let this blood draw forth the creature out of the other world. Come out, galla, for I bind you with unbreakable fetters. This blood which you must taste that I have spilled, makes you mine to command. I adjure you, in the name of the holy angels whose hearts dwell in righteousness, come out, and do as I bid you.”
A shadow spilled into the light as a galla shuddered into being, called away from the other side. She twisted the blade. The man bled furiously as he slumped forward, bleating in a way that grated on her nerves. She dropped him and stepped away. Behind her, a soldier retched, and another began to cry in terror. The galla’s darkness took on substance as it drank from the gushing stream of blood.
“I adjure you, galla, you will do as I command. Kill the man called Hugh of Austra.”
A ripple ran through that towering darkness as her will took hold. It slipped through the stone battlements as through air. The air around it stank of the forge, and its voice rang like the blacksmith’s hammer on steel.
Hugh of Austra.
It descended through the air in the manner of a feather floating free, coming to earth on the road only a few paces from the gate. The farmer panicked. Bolting, he scrambling to the right to escape it, yet the wind on which it scudded pushed it straight into his path. It glided over him, through him. The voice of bells swallowed his scream. Where it passed, bones clattered to the ground. A clamor rose from the enemy, howls of alarm, the beating of drums as against an evil curse, the blast of moaning horns that died away. There was Hugh, who did not move and who could not escape.
Glory to God on highest, who brings punishment down on those who simmer evil in their hearts!
“No one is safe from such sorcery,” said Alexandros.
“No one,” she agreed. “The galla cannot be harmed, only banished. They are implacable.”
“You are the only sorcerer who knows how to raise them,” he added.
She did not answer. Out from the ranks stepped a creature with the body of a woman, the head of a fox, and a bow that reached from head to knee. Even the Enemy desires beauty, and this creature had beauty in her form and her stance as she sighted and loosed. The arrow gleamed as it sped toward its target. Antonia cursed under her breath.
The galla did not veer to avoid the missile. Indeed, it seemed to shift to meet it. Where the arrow pierced, a void of pure black snapped open, and the galla sizzled and vanished, popped right out of existence, as if it had never touched this world.
“Fletched with the feather of a griffin,” said Adelheid angrily. “He has outwitted you, Holy Mother.”
“Griffin feathers are not easily come by. In time, he will use up his entire store,
or become careless and wait too long to let his arrow fly. It is only a matter of time.”
“So am I thinking,” agreed General Lord Alexandros, looking at her and her bloody knife. “Only a matter of time.”
5
WITH Liutgard and five centuries of cavalry, their best men, Sanglant pressed at speed toward Kassel, leaving the rest of the army and the baggage train to travel as swiftly as they could. At midday one day midway through the month of Quadrii, they met scouts, a band of men loyal to the duchess who had fled the town and were camping in the woods and spying on the eastern road.
Their leader, called Adalbert, boasted a pair of gruesome scars on his face, and his left arm hung uselessly at his side. He wept, seeing Duchess Liutgard appear before him, and kissed her ducal ring as he swore fealty.
“Here is your regnant, come to drive the usurpers out of Fesse,” Liutgard said, stepping aside to reveal Wendar’s banner and Sanglant, who was still mounted.
They knelt and bowed their heads.
“You have served your lady well,” said Sanglant, nodding to her to go on. He could see that she wanted no lengthy obeisance but rather swift news.
“What can you tell us?” she asked them.
“The usurpers hold the town, but no more territory than that. Even so, my lady, they only have troops enough to garrison the palace tower, although they keep a watch along the town wall and a guard at the gates. Many townsfolk have fled. Those who remain inside send news to us by way of peddlers and whores.”
“What do these tell you?”
“The usurpers expect Duke Conrad and his army to relieve them. I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know they sent messengers west. We killed one man ourselves a fortnight ago.”
“What of my daughter?”
“You know of the sad fate of your heir.”
“So I have heard,” she said grimly. “She stands within the comfort of the Chamber of Light, beyond our reach. What of Ermengard?”
He wiped away tears. “Still held hostage, my lady duchess. Many with her, who refused to run when they saw she was taken.”
“Why does Conrad want Kassel?” Liutgard asked.