The Copper Promise (36 page)

Sebastian frowned. The smell of the blood was making his headache worse.

‘Child … Ip. I think you know why I’m here. Are your people prepared to make a trade?’

Deftly she kicked the head across the courtyard, the top of her small white foot making a very loud smacking noise on the ruined flesh. Then she looked up at him and held out her hand.

She took him across the courtyard and into a large circular room. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, so that dusty sunshine filtered through the shattered bricks down onto the tree growing in the centre. It was a thorn tree, some larger cousin of the bushes, and its unlovely branches twisted out to either side of the room like deadly welcoming arms. Fat orange fruits grew nestled within the clusters of thorns, and on the tree hung the enchanted armour. Sebastian had little time to take that in, however, as Ip’s family were watching him with bright interest.

‘So they finally sent someone, aye?’

A middle-aged woman stepped forward. Ip ran over to her and the woman enfolded her briefly in her arms.

The family, if that’s what they were, were clearly not as friendly as Ip. The woman standing with her had long freckly limbs crossed with livid scars, and a jowly face with a chin hiding in her neck somewhere. She had light grey eyes, so pale that for a moment Sebastian was sure she was blind until she met his gaze and bared a set of yellowed teeth. Beyond her, sitting on the roots of the tree, was a greatly aged man with a long white beard trailing down to his knees. He clasped the roots to either side of him with big knuckled hands, and there was a dirty bandage on his head.

More worrying were the three large men to either side of the tree. They were all uniformly enormous, one at least an inch taller than Sebastian. Two were broad across the shoulders and solid across the gut, while the other, a bald man with bright eyes, was lean and toned. They carried a collection of dirty blades at their belts.

‘I have come from the Ynnsmouth knights to make a trade,’ said Sebastian.

‘For our armour.’ The woman gestured behind her to the tree, and he took a moment to look at it properly. It was an extremely fine set: an exquisitely crafted mail shirt lay under a breastplate constructed from many small pieces of a black metal Sebastian couldn’t place. The pauldrons, greaves and rondels at the shoulders were made of a similar material, and the whole thing was covered in runes, shining blackly against the metal. The set was apparently missing its helm and gauntlets.

‘What is your name, woman?’

‘Mother Maundsley,’ piped up Ip, ‘and that’s Graffer,’ she continued, pointing at the elderly man perched on the roots, ‘and those are her little boys.’ The three burly men shot her irritated looks, and Mother Maundsley clouted the girl round the ear.

‘Enough of your cheek, Ip.’ The Maundsley woman planted her feet squarely and folded her arms across her chest. They were, Sebastian noticed, all recently wounded. The brothers, the old man – all were covered in scars and fresh cuts. Only Ip was unblemished, her skin clear and white, although her feet were still bloody from the severed head. ‘Do you even know what yer looking at here, knight?’

Sebastian felt a shiver of irritation move down his back. It was too hot, his head hurt, and the stench of the Maundsley family was scratching at the back of his throat. They smelled of blood and old sweat.

‘We are in dire need of the armour, if it can indeed do as claimed. I’m sure you’ve noticed the dragon and her army currently ravaging the land. With this armour the Ynnsmouth knights can lead an offensive against the creature and have some chance—’

‘He don’t know, he don’t care.’ The old man on the roots spoke up. His voice was a wheeze squeezed out of diseased lungs. ‘He knows nothing of Bezcavar.’

The three brothers murmured assent and patted their blades. The bald one ran a dry, pink tongue over his blistered lips.

‘What does it matter?’ Sebastian glanced up at the tree, branches black against the sky. ‘Are you willing to lend it to them, or not?’

‘Are you willing to pay the price?’ Mother Maundsley gestured at the roots that boiled up through the broken floor.

Sebastian cautiously edged towards the tree and saw that the roots were intertwined with bones; some of them bleached white, while others still had strips of gristle stuck to them. That explained the smell.

‘Bezcavar,’ intoned Mother Maundsley, ‘is the king of pain, knight. The prince of wounds and suffering. Agony is his joy, and we live to serve.’

‘That’s what your girl said, yes.’ Sebastian could feel his patience disappearing behind the fog of his headache.

‘The armour is a work of worship, to him, crafted by his greatest pupil.’ The woman was smiling faintly now, and Sebastian suspected she didn’t often get to give this speech. ‘When gathered together the armour is an unstoppable weapon. When complete, no one can stand against he who wears it.’

The old man, Graffer, leaned back and touched one wizened finger to the metal toe cap closest to him, his eyes closed in bliss.
They worship the armour as much as the demon
, thought Sebastian warily.
There is no way they will just lend it to the Order, not for all the coins we can drag over here. They just want to show off.

‘We, the Maundsleys, have been chosen as the keepers of armour. We honour Bezcavar by protecting it, sacrificing to it. There is no greater honour.’ The woman’s eyes flicked over to Ip, then, and Sebastian glanced at the remains amongst the roots. A number of the skulls there were small.

‘You haven’t been doing a very good job, then, have you?’ he said mildly. ‘There are pieces missing.’

Mother and Graffer shared a brief, agitated look. When the woman turned back to Sebastian her teeth were bared in a snarl.

‘It is complete! What do you know about it anyway, knight?’

Sebastian gestured to the armour. The sword on his back was feeling very heavy, and his shoulders were starting to ache. The blade would be more comfortable in his hands, no doubt.

‘Where is the helm? And the gauntlets are missing.’ He shifted his weight and rolled his neck until it clicked. ‘The armour is like a puzzle, and you must have all the pieces.’

‘You know nothing!’ spat Graffer. The old man hoisted himself off the roots and took a few shaky steps forward. He wore a pair of old knives at his belt, thickly crusted with dried blood. ‘We bleed ourselves and others for Bezcavar, and we guard the armour. It is our honour. We were chosen!’

Sebastian wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. It was getting harder to concentrate with the thundering in his head, but at the same time he found he was less concerned. He could feel their words rushing him to a certain path, channelling him to a certain action. There was no avoiding it. He flexed his hands, hoping they weren’t too sweaty to grip. Would there be more family members, hiding behind these orange walls somewhere?

‘I’ll tell you what I know, old man. I know there are pieces missing because I have seen them. Two gauntlets and a helm. Once you had those, sure, then it would be impressive, but now?’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘This is hardly worth the Order’s time.’

But a change had come over the family when he mentioned the missing pieces. The three ugly brothers were suddenly alert, and Mother’s eyes were wild. Graffer seized hold of her arm and she grabbed him back.

‘You know where they are?’

‘Of course I do.’
Well, most of them
, he thought. Fane’s helm was wherever he was, and the same for Roki, if he lived still. Enri’s gauntlet was with Dreyda, who had taken it to study the runes.

‘Tell us,’ said the bald brother.

‘Why would I do that?’ Sebastian smiled. He could smell burned flesh.

‘We will lend you the armour.’ Mother Maundsley skittered forward, her long arms reaching out to him. ‘Just tell us where you saw the others and you can take it for your army.’

Sebastian laughed.

‘You honestly think I will fall for that, do you? Just give you the information and then perhaps meekly lie down so you can stick me with your rusted blades? Then you will have the armour, the whereabouts of its missing pieces, and the money the Order have given me to trade. No, I think I shall go back to the Ynnsmouth knights and return with a small force to take this from you instead.’

‘The knights are too honourable to steal from common folk,’ said Graffer. ‘They will do no such thing.’

‘I am not a Ynnsmouth knight,’ said Sebastian. That, he felt, should have been enough warning for them, but the bald man drew his blade and brandished it.

‘Then we’ll cut it from you,’ he sneered. His brothers followed suit, and after an anxious glance at his boys, Graffer drew his dirty knife too.

Sebastian smiled and nodded. He drew his own sword, taking care to do it slowly so that they could see how sharp it was, how brilliantly it shone in the light from the broken roof. His head was a bright agony, but the scent of scorched flesh no longer made him feel ill.

‘Finally.’

There were others in the walls, it turned out. Afterwards, Sebastian walked amongst the bodies and counted perhaps ten more, although it was difficult to keep the numbers in his head. The flagstones were slick with blood.

‘Bezcavar will be happy enough with this tribute, I think,’ he muttered. The blood did seem to be flowing towards the roots of the thorn tree, although that may have been a trick of the light. He reached up to pluck one of the strange orange fruits from the tree, and a small voice spoke up behind him.

‘You don’t wanna eat those.’

It was Ip. In all the excitement Sebastian had completely forgotten about her. There was some blood on her arms and face, but it wasn’t hers. She was watching him closely, her head tilted slightly to one side as if he were some particularly fascinating insect that had landed on her food.

‘Why not?’

‘Poison,’ she said. She stepped carefully over the bodies of her family. ‘They feed them to the people they catch sometimes. It makes them twitch all over and foam at the mouth.’

Sebastian drew his hand away from the tree and rubbed his beard instead.

‘This –’ he gestured at the bodies on the floor – ‘this wasn’t a good thing for you to see.’

The girl shrugged.

‘I’ve seen lots of things.’

‘
Were
they your family?’

Ip knelt down and pulled a beaded necklace over the head of Mother Maundsley and slung it around her own neck. For a long moment she didn’t say anything, and Sebastian couldn’t see her face.

‘There was a place with lots of cold white stone,’ she said eventually. ‘It had pools of cool water and there were these big birds that walked about everywhere, with long feathers on their backs. They were all different colours. That’s the first thing I remember.’

Sebastian nodded. That sounded like Onwai to him, a distant country to the east. His father had often talked about how marble had been shipped from there in the past. Either way, it did not sound like anywhere in Relios or Creos, both being lands of red stone and orange clay.

Ip was watching him shrewdly. She seemed to guess what he was thinking.

‘They were keeping me to give to the tree,’ she said, nodding at the bloody roots. ‘I don’t know when, but they didn’t ever hurt me much, like they were saving me up.’ She shrugged. ‘So when they gave me to Bezcavar it would be special, I suppose.’

‘You knew all this? And you didn’t run away?’

‘I’m not stupid. When they started looking at me funny I’d have gone.’

Sebastian could well believe that. There was an intelligence to the girl that he hadn’t seen in a child so young before.

He turned back to the armour. ‘What do you know about this?’

Ip walked past him and clambered up onto the roots. She touched her fingers to the fine mail coat.

‘It’s a puzzle, like you said. You need all the pieces. It was stupid of you to tell them you knew where the others are.’ She shot him a pitying look over her shoulder. ‘They were going to kill you anyway, though, so I guess it doesn’t matter.’

‘Good to know.’ Sebastian grimaced. No doubt Sir John had guessed as much too, but he was only gambling the life of one disgraced ex-knight. ‘What happens when it’s complete?’

Ip shrugged.

‘I dunno.’ She stopped to turn and look directly at him. ‘Why didn’t you kill me too?’

Sebastian’s first thought was to lie to the girl, tell her he had no intention of killing children, but somehow he knew that wouldn’t be enough. When he’d drawn his blade against the Maundsley family a feverish heat had descended on him, and he hadn’t stopped until they were all bleeding on the floor.

‘I didn’t see you,’ he said. He felt tired and ill. ‘In truth, I barely remember any of it. I just had to kill everyone. I didn’t think about who they were.’

The girl raised her eyebrows. Sebastian had the unpleasant feeling she understood very well what he was trying to say.

‘Are you going to kill me now?’

‘No, of course not.’ His tone was terser than he wanted. ‘What else do you know about the armour?’

‘I know that a mage made it a long time ago. He was friends with the demon, but it drove him mad in the end.’

‘And where did this family get it from?’

‘How would I know? They’ve had it as long as they’ve had me.’

Sebastian sighed. They could split the armour amongst the Order, and hopefully it would give the men enough courage to face the dragon; at this stage, any advantage was worth taking. The armour was fixed to the tree with pins nailed directly into the wood, and it looked very heavy. Getting it back to the Order by himself was going to be difficult.

Again, the girl seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘They have a mule,’ she said. ‘There’s a stable round the back.’

He looked down at the girl with red feet.

‘Would you like to come with me?’

Frith shifted his footing and felt his heart skip a beat as a gust of wind pushed him momentarily closer to the edge. Muttering curses, he dipped the end of the brush into the ink once more, and flattened the fabric against the stone. There was a small bundle of strips of cloth next to him. Every now and then Jolnir would poke the bundle with a stick, and nod merrily.