The Plague of Swords, Page 5

  Aneas was quiet enough that his brother could sense his fear.

  “You’ll be fine!” he said, unhelpfully.

  Aneas made a face. “You and bloody Gabriel make it look so easy.”

  Gavin nodded. No one was near them. “That’s the trick of it, brother mine. Make it look easy. Never ever let them see you show anything but humour, and the rest is easy.”

  “Really?” Aneas looked more annoyed than pleased.

  “No, I’m lying to make you feel better,” Gavin said. “Really, you just make everything up as you go along.”

  Aneas sighed. But then he offered his brother a rare smile. “That sounds more like me,” he said.

  Long before the sun set, Aneas and his party were gone, headed north.

  * * *

  Dawn. A dawn without a proper breakfast—they were two days’ march from the nearest supply, and out of grains and bread. With a lot of grumbling, the army rose, struck its tents, and formed to march east and south.

  As men fell into their ranks on the impromptu wilderness parade ground, dodging young fir trees and raspberry prickers, one white wedge tent remained standing. A messenger brought word to the acting captain—the Green Earl—as his leg harnesses were buckled by his new squire, Isabeau. His stomach growled loudly enough that she laughed.

  “Tell Sukey,” Ser Gavin grumbled.

  Sukey was high on the back of her wagon when the herald cried her name. He pointed out the lone tent still standing even as a pair of imperial soldiers ran up to tell her that something was wrong.

  Annoyed, Sukey walked over, summoning two of her women to attend her, but the smell hit her before she was nigh the tent.

  She shouted—the men inside were mountaineers from the south of Morea, and both had, it proved, been sick for days, but everyone was exhausted and most men had coughs and pains.

  It was only when she looked in the tent that she paled.

  She summoned Master Mortirmir by means of a working, to see the corpses. And in the same working, she informed the Green Earl that something was very wrong, and showed him the inside of the tent.

  Ser Ricar Orcsbane was commanding the rear guard—he and his knights halted and watched.

  Mortirmir rode up as the army vanished into the trees.

  When the tent was pulled down, the corpses were fully revealed. Their faces were black.

  Mortirmir entered his memory palace, cast a variety of workings, and then ordered everyone present to separate themselves from what remained of the camp. To their scandal and horror, he opened one of the bodies and revealed the lungs full of black ooze. He took samples—by then the grave diggers were flinching away—and sighed.

  “Burn them,” he told Sukey. “No—never mind. I’ll do it.”

  He flicked two fingers, and the bodies immolated—burned so hot and so fiercely that nothing was left but marks on the matted ferns, which themselves were shriveled and smouldering, and a little black ash.

  He gathered every witness and every person who had handled the corpses and began a great working that still occupied him as the sun climbed toward noon. Birds sang, and the sun beat down through the magnificent, tall trees, and Sukey had never been so afraid in all her life. She was coughing regularly by early afternoon, and the cough left little flecks of black on the backs of her hands. All of the Knights of the Order had dismounted—they were coughing too.

  As the shadows began to lengthen, Mortirmir seemed to come alive. “Right,” he said. “Gather round,” he snapped.

  Eager men and women pressed close to him—Sukey’s two most reliable young women, a half-dozen junior archers who’d been told off to bury the bodies as punishment for some transgression including Wilful Murder, a dozen Knights of the Order and their squires.

  Morgon raised an eyebrow at Sukey. “I need a canteen of water,” he said. “Wine would be better, but I assume we’re out.”

  “I’m not out,” Sukey said.

  She fetched him wine in an earthenware jug. He raised an enormous amount of potentia and turned it into ops so cleanly that it was almost contemptuous. Sukey had seen her mother handle as much, but not so casually. Practitioners seldom held ops for any length of time because of the effort of concentration required, yet Mortirmir held a vast globe of raw, barely fettered power over his head the way a strong man might hold a bar of iron—casually.

  He took the wine and sniffed it. “Good wine,” he said. “Morean?”

  “Yes,” Sukey managed. “Can you save us?” she asked.

  Mortirmir narrowed his eyes. “Yes and no,” he said.

  Then he poured the globe of ops over his head into the ceramic wine jug as if volume had no meaning, as the jug was less than one hundredth the size of the glowing ball he’d had when he started. Throughout the process, he spoke, almost at random. He spoke single words, some in Archaic and some in a language none of them had heard.

  Sukey coughed. It was a long, wrenching cough, and there were flecks of scarlet mixed with the black flakes on the back of her hand, and she began to shake. It was the oddest feeling—she felt hollow inside.

  My mother died, she thought.

  That hurt. She had been in the field almost without a pause since her mother died fighting the dragon Ash, and she had ruthlessly kept herself from thinking about it. She had drunk too much wine, mounted Tom Lachlan, and worked her people like slaves rather than think about her mother’s death, but a little lung-blood on the back of her hand...

  Mortirmir was very young—people said he was just seventeen. He was tall, and still capable of the kind of graceless, gawky movement that characterized adolescent boys without their full growth. He could also be very difficult, at least in part because he didn’t always seem to understand what normal people did, or said.

  He dressed like a knight and in fact was a passable jouster. At the moment, he wore black—black wool arming coat, black hose, black hood, with a gold knight’s belt and an Umroth ivory-hilted dagger that went with his black hair and pointed black beard. A beard he was pulling at with his left hand even as his right hand made arcane gestures and left traces of a blue fire in the air.

  The last of his refined ops vanished into the ceramic bottle. The displaced air made a small pop like the cork coming out of a bottle.

  He raised one eyebrow at her and put the earthenware jug to his lips and drank.

  “Mmm,” he said. “Lovely—heavy. I wonder if heavier wines will hold more power? Wine holds more power than water. But why?” He stared off into space, his face almost frozen in concentration.

  Sukey looked around at the knights and peasants, workers, archers, and wagoners gathered around. “Can you...help us?” she asked carefully.

  He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Possibly,” he said. “Let’s just see if there are side effects first, shall we?”

  In fact, he began to glow a little, and he exhaled a short flame of blue fire and coughed.

  “Hmm. Unlikely to set a new fashion among Nova Terra vintners, but it will do. Sukey?” He handed her the jug and then paused. “Do be careful. I’m not sure I could make another batch today.”

  “How much?” Sukey asked. Then she coughed. Mortirmir grabbed her hands as soon as she was done coughing and looked at the blood, phlegm, and black flakes through a lens, even while supporting the weight of the jug.

  “Never mind,” he said. “A full cup, then.” He poured it out himself and gave it to her, and she drank it off. She looked at Mortirmir, winced at the taste, gave a sharp burp, and—

  Mortirmir watched her fall and tried to catch her and succeeded in lowering her the rest of the way—on her back. Sukey’s mouth opened and a bolt of blue flame as long as a man’s arm emerged. Then she turned over and threw up onto the ground by her. Much of what she vomited was black. And stank.

  Mortirmir shook his head. “Right, I’m a fool. Of course, I don’t have the plague and she does. Well—it works. Next?”

  They all hung back as Sukey’s heels b
egan to drum on the ground.

  * * *

  South and west of Gilson’s Hole, Amicia’s hospital continued to care for the sick. What disturbed her most was that two weeks and more after the great battle, the number of her patients was not decreasing, it was increasing.

  Worst of all, people in whom she had invested power and healing were remaining abed, and not making the recoveries that medicine and hermetical practice should have allowed.

  She stood over Ser Gelfred, who had been badly wounded—more than once—in battle. But he had survived the wounds and the first night after, and she had poured power into him, prayed by him, knit his bones and his arteries so that he had every chance of recovering the almost-severed right arm and the burnt leg.

  Until the cough started.

  Amicia had been awake for days, watching her people, and she could no longer remember when the cough went from an annoyance to a threat. But Gelfred started to cough after only a few days, and now he lay beside her, coughing and coughing. When he coughed into his pillow, black flakes emerged.

  Amicia prayed. She had looked at the flakes, and she knew that they were the shriveled, necrotic remains of Gelfred’s lungs. She had cast her most potent workings, and the disease had marched on, uninhibited, unslowed.

  Gelfred’s latest bout of coughing came to a merciful end and his eyes—clear and knowing—rested on hers. “I’m dying,” he said. “I would like the last rites.”

  Amicia nodded. “I wish,” she said. She stopped, because he might not have much time, and rose and went out of the tent into the sun-dappled day. She found Father François standing by the Mary shrine in the middle of the hospital camp.

  “Father, Ser Gelfred...” She paused, afraid she was about to give way to tears. “Last rites.”

  She was unused to being defeated by mere disease.

  Father François nodded. “Cough?” he said.

  She nodded. “It was nothing...and now...” She took a deep breath.

  Father François looked at her, put a hand to his mouth, and coughed.

  * * *

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Gabriel asked.

  He was mounted on his griffon. It had reached a size somewhere between enormous and terrifying, and seemed, further, to have grown an immense amount in a single night after the great battle. The magnificent beast now sported an extravagant red leather saddle between its wings and long, shiny metal spurs attached to its already horrific-looking talons—each spur a long curving sword with complex attachments made by Master Pye’s people in Albinkirk.

  The griffon—Ariosto—was standing perfectly balanced on a massive crosspole made from a single oak tree, set into the side of the highest tower in the citadel of Albinkirk, just outside the beast’s sleeping chamber in the top turret.

  Gabriel Muriens was sitting in the saddle, white as one of Blanche’s new linen sheets. At each minute alteration in balance that the great monster made to deal with the various air currents that wafted over the city, Gabriel’s look of alarm sharpened. It was more than a hundred feet to the ground below. The ground was the tiltyard—stone flags and brick.

  “Look, I used all my courage just getting into the saddle,” Gabriel complained.

  Close by, on the same perch, stood a wyvern missing a wing. The wing had been replaced with a wing of pure ops, a massive thing of fire and cobwebs.

  “You won’t learn to fly a griffon by talking about it,” said the wyvern. “Besides, he’s made his first flights. He’s confident. Can’t you hear him?”

  “All too well,” Gabriel said.

  “Then get over it. Time presses, my dear Gabriel. I need to be in my own realm. We are no closer to victory than we were before Gilson’s Hole. Come!” With that, the wyvern leapt into the air—and sank like a stone in water. Gabriel watched, his heart in his throat, as the young wyvern with a wing of fire seemed to fall away beneath them—wings opening, then fully spread—

  Halfway down the tower, the wyvern’s plummet turned to flight. Just as Gabriel felt the griffon’s weight go forward inalterably. He wrenched his eyes away from the wyvern to see the tower rushing past him—

  The griffon had fallen off the perch. Or leapt.

  The ground rushed at them faster than Gabriel Muriens, the Red Duke of Thrake, victor of Gilson’s Hole, had ever moved before. The tower blurred past...

  The great green and red and gold wings filled like the sails of a great ship in a changing wind, and under him, Gabriel could feel the change in tension in his mount’s wings as the heavy muscles took up the strain—a crushing weight seemed to pull him back in his high-backed saddle, down into the leather, and a breath hissed out of his lips as his hips took the strain.

  A wind of magical potency roared in his ears, and tears welled up in his eyes unbidden, and he could neither think nor work magic—

  And then, in a twinkling of Ariosto’s jolly, mad eyes, they were skimming over the town. If the griffon had to make any great effort to fly, it was transmitted only in the rhythmic pulse of his wings under his saddle and the sound of his breathing. Gabriel had the feeling of a huge, slow horse beneath him, the wings beating like the powerfully driving haunches of a charger, just slower.

  Gabriel’s throat was tight, and sore. The wind was cool, and he was chilled very quickly—he was wearing a light doublet and hose, and his understanding of flying was being changed with every wingbeat.

  His great mount, who radiated love in the aethereal, was following the wyvern, and the wyvern was moving fast, far out over the plain between the distant Adnacrags and the great river. They were moving so fast that the ground was a blur, and Gabriel had to look around very carefully to figure out where he was. It was like looking at a map of undetermined scale. There was the city of Albinkirk—but could that really be the South Ford? Gabriel tried to calculate how fast they were going, but he could not be sure of anything—the distances, the height...

  The wyvern began to descend.

  Do you know where we’re going, Ariosto?

  No, lord. I follow the most noble one. Love you! Hungry!

  Gabriel winced and flew on.

  But it was not long before the wyvern descended again, turning, until they were all flying along at the height of the trees—the nearly endless trees. At this low altitude, it did rather seem as if the whole earth were covered in forests. The wyvern led the way down from the sky—banked suddenly over a stream that shone in the sunlight like glass, and followed it up stream and farther up, over beaver dams and through meadows where it wound, so that they cut across the snaking course in a few heartbeats and rejoined it—it turned in a long, lazy line, and there was a break in the endless trees that showed a flash of the great Albin River to the south, and then Gabriel, who was fighting both awe and terror, saw smoke from nearby chimneys and the wyvern turned more tightly.

  Then there was a wheat field, the new grain waist-high and a lurid green, and the wyvern landed easily, running a few paces along the ground to lose the last of its velocity and momentum.

  Gabriel’s heart, already moving fast, threatened to burst out of his chest. The griffon flared its magnificent wings so that they seemed to catch fire in the sun, and he slowed, and slowed again, and then seemed to fall out of the sky...

  And they were down. Paradoxically, as soon as Gabriel’s senses told him that they were down and had stopped moving—as soon as the griffon’s slightly mad eyes were on him, as the great head turned, as if to say Wasn’t that great?—he wanted to do it again.

  He reached out and patted his great bird-monster-thing, and clenched his arms around Ariosto’s neck.

  Love you, he said.

  Love you! he was answered. Hungry!

  He rolled onto his stomach and slid down from the saddle, savouring the warm sun on his cold skin.

  The wyvern had just transformed into a dark-haired man with an elegant scar, a long nose, and no right arm. As Gabriel himself was a tall young man with dark hair and no left hand, they matched well
.

  “Where are we?” Gabriel asked Master Smythe.

  “The Manor of Gracewittle Middlehill, Gabriel. Held of the Captain of Albinkirk in knight service by Lady Helewise.”

  “Oh,” Gabriel said. “Yes. I needed to come here.” His eyes went to the house. “Maybe not today.”

  “Reliable people tell me you are ready to return to your duties,” Master Smythe said. “I thought we could kill two birds with but a single stone—your first flight—wasn’t it easy?”

  “My throat hurts. Otherwise, superb.” Gabriel felt almost light-headed. And he dreaded seeing Lady Helewise, lover of Ser John Crayford. The former captain of Albinkirk. Now, dead. “Why does my throat hurt?”

  Master Smythe glanced at him. “If we had been higher in altitude, I’d suspect your sore throat was caused by the cold air,” he said. “I told you to dress warmly. But as it is, I suspect you screamed your throat raw when Ariosto chose to launch.”

  “I did not,” Gabriel said stiffly.

  Master Smythe looked at him under his eyebrows. “As you like,” he said softly. “All the way down,” he said softly.

  “You are enjoying this too much,” Gabriel said.

  Master Smythe shrugged.

  * * *

  Helewise watched her daughter, Phillippa, as the young woman stood on tiptoes, trying to see from the front door of their house what was happening in the fields closer to the stream. Helewise sighed, her only outward concession to the desolation that reigned in her heart.

  The arrival of two monsters of the Wild had occasioned only the most temporary panic. Philippa held a heavy arbalest cradled in both arms, but it was not spanned.

  “There’s a man—two men. Oh, Mama! It’s the Red Duke—not dressed in red. He has on a plain doublet, but I’ve seen him...”

  Helewise did not allow herself another sigh. She got to her feet, steadied herself, and went to the great central fireplace and swung the copper over the fire. “Fetch bread,” she said. “Hypocras, perhaps, if Mother Crabbe has any prepared. Look in the kitchen...”