Sliding Void (4 page)

‘I am betrayed,’ said Calder. ‘Baron Halvard burnt my schooner at her moorings and murdered my crew with poison at his own table. He has broken the compact and sold us out to the enemy for a weight of silver. That was the price of his honour.’

‘Ah, Prince Calder, last of the House of Durk,’ smirked the sorcerer. ‘Reduced circumstances, then?’

Calder had to suppress himself from shouting at the sorcerer. The assassins would be close enough to hear them in a minute. ‘I have followed
your
plans, and I have been reduced in all things. Four armies lie dead in front of the walls of Narvalo. My crew and I have spent a year in foreign parts voyaging home, fighting creatures and monsters and enemies so sodding strange it would freeze the veins of lesser men. Now all I have been left is this dagger, Noak here, and my honour.’

‘Well,’ said the sorcerer. ‘Top tip for next time, your highness. You would have done better keeping your armada of schooners intact and losing the blade, rather than vice-versa.’

‘You dog,’ cursed Calder. ‘I built the giant wooden wolf like you instructed, left it outside their walls. You know what the enemy did to it? They dragged it out onto the sea-flows, set barrels of oil alight in a circle around it, melted the ice and drowned every man hiding inside.’

‘Yeah, heard about that one,’ said the sorcerer. ‘Hey-ho. You got to give it to their priests. Stupid, they aren’t.’

‘This is your doing!’

‘Kid, I warned you. There were other ways of getting you crowned high king that were open to us. The subtle kind, bribery, corruption, backroom shenanigans. Wizards like me, that’s where we do our best work. But oh no, you couldn’t keep it in your pants. You wanted the big dynastic marriage to Sibylla. Well, guess what, your highness, getting even against her ancestral enemies was the price for that sweet booty.’

‘You dare to talk about Sibylla like that…’

‘I hate to burst your bubble, boy, but your sweet girl is lining herself up a selection of nice rich Narvalak noblemen to seal her future with.’

‘Liar! They are blood enemies. Her council would never accept such a marriage.’

‘Don’t have lot of choice anymore, theirs was one of the four armies that got iced last year, if you forgive the pun, remember? Oh, and the girl’s used the engagement ties between your country and hers to declare your ass dead while annexing your lands. Not too sloppy. Guess there’s more of her mother in her blood than I gave her credit for. That’s my way of saying she had me fooled too, not that it’s much consolation to you right now.’

For a second, Calder was almost mute with fury. ‘You fucker, you lying, false—’

‘I’m sending you my apologies, my prince,’ shrugged the sorcerer. ‘Along with something a little more substantive. Sure as shit didn’t think things were going to pan out this badly.’ One of the eyes in the ghostly dark apparition winked at Calder. ‘Compared to you mayflies, I’m almost immortal. Think a man would have learned by now, right?’

‘My prince,’ hissed Noak, his eye pressed to a gap in the thatch. ‘Halvard’s people are here.’

The evil witch-light winked out inside the hut, leaving Calder and his manservant alone. His honour wasn’t armour, Noak wasn’t up to much in a brawl, so that just left the hunting dagger. Calder drew it out, keeping the bone handle tight against his sweaty palm. A hand’s length of steel, against what? Seven armoured men were coming down the slope, large as trolls, swords sharp enough to slice ironwood. Killers all, rattling with blades and crossbow bolt bandoleers. Their faces were hidden beneath steel wolf masks riveted into the front of their horned helms.
As if they need to look any more fearsome given the size of them.

Noak still held the iron pan. It was just heavy enough to brain a man, if you got lucky. ‘My prince,’ he whispered. ‘If I’m favoured enough to be allowed to follow you into the Halls of the Twice-risen, will you grant me a boon?’

Calder nodded.

‘Pension me the fuck out of this job.’

‘Follow me out of this hut, and you’ll have earnt it.’

The plan started off as Calder had foreseen. Outside, the seven brutes piled down the slope and headed past the oil derrick and the driller’s hut, intent on following the false trial of footprints in the snow left by Calder and his manservant. They didn’t bother checking the hut, and why would they? Nobody in their right mind was going to take on a company of shield-warriors. Was it Calder’s imagination, or were the two slaves outside walking the circle a lot slower now? He lay that thought aside, he didn’t have time to be distracted by their silent toil. The hunters had kept their crossbows strapped and dangling from their armour. So, they weren’t about to shoot Calder down as he fled. This suggested that his treacherous ex-ally, Baron Halvard, had expressed a desire to have the notorious Prince Calder taken alive. Not out of any sense of mercy, but so that the dog would have something more than a corpse to hand over to the enemy. A bad memory sprang forth. Outside the walls of Narvalo, the priests threatening Calder that unless he abandoned the siege forthwith, they were going to give him a criminal’s death tied to a stake, personally dipping him in tar and lighting the match. Yes, a living prince would be worth quite a lot to the Narvalaks. It wouldn’t matter if there were a blizzard pummelling their city, Calder could foresee standing room only in the large square outside their high temple.

Calder timed it just right, springing the door open a second after the hut fell out of sight of the fighters. Much to Calder’s surprise, Noak came sprinting right behind him, seemingly as eager as Calder to take the shield-warriors in the rear. Well, if they were planning to take Calder alive to burn at the stake, Noak’s only chance of life was that the seven thugs would seize the manservant for the local slave market. On the baron’s lands, that would probably mean Noak ending up blind and tongueless as the third cog on a driller’s well. Not really living at all. Even as Calder closed the gap on the warriors, the snow muffling his boots, it was hard to know where to plunge his dagger. Somewhere between the round iron shield and the chainmail? Try to pierce the leather neck-guard hanging down from the back of the horned helmet? Back of the thighs? One up the ass?

The problem was solved when Noak brained one of them from behind and the remaining heroes suddenly became aware that maybe they should’ve checked the driller’s hut behind them after all. With one of their number collapsing forward, pole-axed by a first-rate head trauma, Calder shoved his blade into the exposed neck of the shield-warrior who’d whirled around to face him. The giant went down gurgling behind the metal facemask, no doubt a look of surprise on his face to match Calder’s shocked realisation that the shield-warrior had taken his dagger with him. Showing a little more foresight than his master, Noak was trying to pull a loaded crossbow off his victim, right up until the second when one of the assassins shoulder-charged the manservant and sent him flying sideways.

Calder didn’t have the luxury of trying to retrieve weapons from his victim, as four of the baron’s bulls jumped over their comrade’s corpse and kept on coming at him. He back-pedalled, turned and ran, followed by the killers’ roars of fury. He didn’t have their armour to slow him down. But then, he wasn’t running with leg muscles the circumference of a tree and pursuing hungry, unarmed prey, either. It took a lot to sweat in weather this cold, but Calder managed it, reaching the shadow of the creaking oil derrick a couple of steps ahead of his pursuers. He swivelled around desperately. To one side the two slaves were still blindly pushing the turning arm. He lunged for the wooden measuring stick half-covered in tar and held it up, a blunt useless spear against the five giants closing in on him. They still hadn’t drawn their crossbows, leaving Calder to face a thicket of sword points and axe heads pointing in his direction.

‘Come on, lads. You can let me go. I’ll make it worth your while. Just see me back to my side of the border and there’ll be more silver in it for you than you’ll earn in a lifetime of humping for the baron.’

‘Careful, your highness,’ one of them laughed, breathing hard, ‘you hit me with that pole and you’re going to leave an oily scratch on my tunic.’

‘Do the smart thing,’ pleaded Calder.

‘You think that free you’re good for more than a farthing back home?’ sneered one of the men. ‘Only way your hide is worth anything is the blood price we’re going to get from the baron. We push you across the border, the only people who get rich are the soldiers serving in what used to be your army. Except it isn’t anymore, is it? Heard it belongs to your bitch now, except she ain’t even that, is she?’

Calder waved the measuring stick menacingly, but it only made the shield-warriors laugh harder. ‘You don’t get to talk about Sibylla like that. She’s highborn compared to you pack rats.’

‘Are you really going to make us work for this?’ growled one of the shield-warriors, shifting the axe he was holding between his hands. ‘Baron wants you back for the fire, but nobody said anything about you needing to have your wedding tackle attached when we hand you over.’

‘Work for this?’ Calder glanced back to where Noak was lying prone in the snowdrift, his ribs being kicked by the same shield-warrior that had shouldered him down. ‘If it’s a blade or kindling that’s on offer, you braves better practice your sales pitch.’

There was a low hissing noise behind Calder.
What the hell’s that?
One of the warriors made to move forward, but his colleague halted him. ‘Stomped, not sliced. He’s got to walk back on his own feet, as I’m fucked if I’m carrying him all the way to the castle.’

The hissing was louder now and it suddenly occurred to Calder what else sounded like an ice snake homing in on a man’s heat. He hurled the oil-measuring pole forward like a javelin, glancing off the metal mask of the shield-warrior in front of him. The distraction only lasted a second, but it was long enough for him to turn and start running up the slope without one of them cutting out his hamstrings with their blades. Calder had put a little ground behind him when the oil well exploded. That was what Calder’s canny old retainer had been doing when the prince had snowballed him. Shutting off the valve to the well. But the driller’s slaves hadn’t known. They had still been walking the circle, slower and slower, building up pressure.  Pieces of machinery scythed out, cutting down half of the baron’s killers, the derrick replaced by a fountaining black gusher spewing oil over the virgin snow. Incredibly, the two blind slaves had escaped the explosion. They were still walking the circle, except their walk was now a sprint, the well’s wooden beam unattached from the pumping mechanism. Two of the shield-warriors were on their feet, distinctly unamused by the devastation wrought on their friends. Calder kept scrambling up the slope, but a crossbow bolt took him in the back of the left leg, a stream of intense pain as he collapsed down to the snow, screaming.

‘Baron’s going to be disappointed,’ cried one of the shield-warriors, pulling back the lever on his crossbow. ‘But we don’t need his blood money that much.’

Not as disappointed as me.

The giant’s friend yelled up the slope as he ploughed through the snow. ‘Reckon we’re going to have to tar and light you up here, boy, now that you’ve struck black gold.’

Calder moaned, unable to crawl further. He stared up at the pale silver sky, pregnant with snow clouds. Far above, a pair of black dots were circling. Crows from the Halls of the Twice-born, sent to grab his soul in their claws, to carry a dying prince back to his ancestors? He clutched at his leg, trying to staunch the blood pumping out across the cold hillside. The blood was his oil. Pumping, pumping. Then the nearest black dot spat out a bolt of thunder and it slapped into the slope, exploding with a hundred times the power of a trebuchet, rock and frozen dirt showering down on his head. Another spit, then another, in quick succession, Calder’s ears hardly hearing the thunderclaps through the smoke and fury. Breaking through the cloud of vaporised stone and steaming snow, the distant dot emerged, a black monster with two wheels captured spinning inside its body, dragon’s breath hazing furiously out of its rear.

Calder shouted up at the flying monster, but his ears were ringing deaf and the words only sounded in his mind. ‘Are you the Hall’s crow, are you the—?’

A twin of the ebony-coloured beast emerged out of the cloud of carnage, Noak’s prone body clutched by six insect legs, giving the creature’s monstrous size its true perspective.
Shit, it’s going to feed on him
! They were bigger than any insect Calder had ever seen, even out in the hell-haunted wastes where he’d ventured with his crew and schooner. A decapitated arm still clutched a great sword less than a foot from Calder in the snow. Calder rolled over to it, prizing open the cold pale fingers and thrusting the blade up uncertainly towards the creatures. ‘Come on, you big ugly dung beetles. I’ve fought armies and killers. I’ve battled creatures out on the sea flow that make you look like lantern flies. I am holding your fate in my hand.’

Hovering almost soundlessly, the closest flying beast opened a red eye, painting Calder’s chest with a warm red cross. ‘The evil eye, is it?’ He puckered a kiss up towards the monster. ‘Come on, you bastard, you’re boring me to death down here.’

It’s kissed him back, the sharp nick of a something flying through the air almost too fast to follow and slapping into his chest. He looked down dumbly at the tiny needled tooth embedded in his tunic. He laughed. Calder had taken worse sled splinter scratches on his hands. Then the young prince experienced the novelty of ninety thousand volts of electricity coursing through his muscles. After that, Calder didn’t feel much at all.