The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (9 page)

There was more light.

He stepped towards the golden door, which seemed farther away.

The lights grew brighter.

Gabriel moved—decisively. He ran across the tiles, past the mirror and, to his immense relief, the door did not flee before him and he grasped the golden handle. He pulled the door open and found Prudentia standing at the other side with an arm outstretched to him and he stumbled through.

He stood in his own palace and breathed deep. The sun fell like golden fire from the dome overhead and outside his green door, great gouts of green
potentia
rolled and seethed like the sea in a storm.

“Something is coming,” Prudentia said.

Gabriel patted her ivory hand.

“Was it bad?” she asked.

“Whatever that was, it misses its master,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think I could face it again.”

He surfaced into the real and looked around. It was still a brilliant spring day. Squirrels were running along branches that overhung the road.

“Stay sharp,” the captain yelled.

After the captain’s shout, every man looked around carefully, and for fifty jingling strides, the only sounds were those of horse hooves on stone, the woodpecker in the distance and the rattle of armour and horse harness.

The captain pushed his
aethereal
sense out as far as he could. He was surprised how far that was. He was not broadcasting—to do so would be to announce his presence as far away as the villages of the Huran. Instead, he listened passively. He was able to detect a strong presence well to the east; another enormous presence the same distance and more to the north that almost had to be his mother.

The Wyrm was a dull warmth from over the
aethereal
horizon—a line that had almost nothing to do with the actual horizon. It had never occurred to the captain before that moment to ask why distances and horizons were different in the
aethereal
, but in that moment, he thought of how he might hide—if he could map the gradients of power.

Distraction is one of the most dangerous failings in a hermeticist. He was building a mapping process in his memory palace when he realized that his horse had stopped moving.

Ser Gavin gave him a look left over from childhood. “Fat lot of good you are, my overmighty brother,” he said. “Asleep?”

Gabriel looked round, disconcerted. The wagon was rolling to a stop in front of the goodwife’s house. The older girl had just run inside, calling for her mother, and the archers were leering. The girl had been on the porch, spinning, wearing only a shift.

Francis Atcourt was leering, too. Gabriel raised an eyebrow and the dapper knight raised his and grinned.

“Not something I expect to see in the woods every day—a girl that pretty,” he said.

Chris Foliak, Atcourt’s usual partner in crime, grunted. “And she’s coming with us,” he said.

“And we’re
protecting
her from the
monsters
,” Ser Gabriel said slowly. “Not, gentlemen, being the monsters ourselves.”

“I won’t hurt her at all!” Foliak said, grinning. But when he met the captain’s eye, his smile vanished. “Only having a joke, my lord.”

Gabriel reached out again. There was something—

Father Arnaud emerged with the goodwife.

“How can you be sure it was my man?” she asked on the porch.

“We can’t. But having seen the signs, the captain feels you’re better in the walls of Albinkirk.” Father Arnaud glanced at Ser Gabriel.

“Shall I describe him for you? The old da, he was not a tall man—”

Father Arnaud shook his head.

“But what if there’s some mistake, and I pack and leave?” she asked. “And he comes back looking for his bairns and a spot o’ supper?”

“Mama,” the older girl said carefully. She had a low voice and she was still wearing only a shift. “Mama, these gentlemen think there’s somewhat unnatural, right here. They want to go. They ain’t stayin’. If’n we want to be with them, we need to go.”

The goodwife looked around. “It’s me home,” she said quietly.

“And I hope that in a month you can return to it,” Gabriel said. “But for the moment, ma’am, I’d request you and your oldsters get everything you can into that wagon.”

The goodwife wrung her hands for as long as a child might take to count ten.

“Yes,” she said. “But what if it were’n my old man?”

“We’ll leave a note,” Ser Gabriel said.

“Ee can’t read,” the goodwife answered. “You take the kiddies and I’ll stay.”

“I’d rather you came, ma’am,” Ser Gabriel said.

She went in, and her two eldest, a boy and a girl, went to help. When the girl emerged with the first armload, she was fully dressed in a kirtle and a gown of good wool, which showed that she had some sense, or quick ears.

The boys began to move wooden crates and trunks into the wagon, and before the sun had sunk a finger’s width, the children—all twelve of them—were up on top of the load.

“By Saint Eustachios,” the woman said. “It’s lucky we’d scarce unpacked. I hate to leave my good spinning wheel. There it is. And my baskets. Good boy.”

“You’re coming, then?” asked the captain.

She looked down. “Children need me,” she said. “The priest says… he says—” She put her head down.

Father Arnaud looked hurt.

“War horses,” the captain called. “Three leagues to go and three hours of good light. Let’s move.”

Cully shook his head. He took a heavy horse-dropper out of his quiver and tucked it through his belt. He exchanged a long look with flap-eared Cuddy, his best mate.

“Fuck me,” Cuddy said.

The captain rode with his head down, concentrating. He was nearly sure he’d caught something, or someone, breaking cover—a hermetical power trying to conceal itself.

Count Zac’s horsemen moved back and forth at the forest edge, winnowing the ground like a team of hayers with scythes. They now rode with arrows on their bows, and once, when a deer broke cover, they all shot before they fully identified the threat, or lack thereof. The deer was butchered on the spot—intestines removed, and the rest hung between two of the spare horses.

“That will attract anything we haven’t already attracted,” Gavin muttered. He scratched his shoulder. Then he reached back under his harness to scratch.

The captain looked up into the branches and saw the edge of a wing—a flash of a talon.

“Wyvern!” he called.

In an instant, every weapon was drawn. Eyes strained towards the sky.

The Red Knight backed his horse a few steps. “I think it wanted to be seen. And we’re still in the Wyrm’s circle. Someone’s either cocky or insane.”

Gavin frowned. “Or trying to make our friend show his hand.” His voice was muffled by the pig snout on his bascinet.

“Move!” called the captain. “Eyes on the woods. Only men on the road watch the sky. Keep moving. Let’s not be out here after dark, eh?”

“Didn’t Alcaeus get ambushed right here?” Gavin asked.

“Further east—four hours’ ride from Albinkirk,” Ser Gabriel said. “Drat.”

“Drat?”

“I have a flickering contact. There’s something out there, trying not to be seen, but using power. Only a little. It has some sort of ward.” He frowned.

Ser Gavin rose in his stirrups and looked around.

Ser Gabriel’s horse plunged forward. “Faster,” he said.

The wagon team began to canter, and the wagon jolted along the ancient stone road. The horses began to go faster.

“No bird song,” Ser Gabriel shouted. “Ware!”

Off to their right, one of Count Zac’s men drew to his cheek, his body arched in his light saddle, and loosed as he rose in his stirrups. He loosed
down
as if shooting at the ground, and his horse sprang away.

Something as fast as a rabbit and ten times as large appeared and struck the archer’s horse.

He loosed his second arrow, point blank, into the thing’s back from above.

His mare stumbled, and four more of the things hit her, tearing chunks off her haunches. She screamed but lacked the muscles to kick or even stand, and she slumped, and her rider somersaulted clear, drew his sabre and died valiantly, ripped to pieces by a wave of the things—ten or more, as fast as greyhounds but ten times as ferocious.

Zac’s other horsemen were already raining arrows on the pack, and it took hits.

“Hold!” called the captain. “On me,” he said to the knights. “Squires—charge.”

Behind him, Toby led the squires in a charge at the rest of the pack. The war horses were a different proposition from the riding horses, and whatever the things were, they died under the big steel-shod hooves. Bone cracked and chipped.

Shrill eerie screams ripped across the road to echo off the far trees.

Cully had all the archers together around the wagon. Francis Atcourt’s young page, Bobby, had all the archers’ horses in his fist and looked ready to cry.

The horses began to panic, and the boy lost them, the reins ripped from his hands.

“Wyvern!” Cully said.

In fact, there were two wyverns—or even three. One scooped up a horse—Count Zac’s much beloved spare pony—and with one enormous beat of its sixty-foot wingspan was gone.

The other went for the wagon. It took Cully’s horse-dropper in the neck and flinched, but a flailing fore-talon ripped a small boy in two, covering his siblings with his gore. Ricard Lantorn put a needlepoint bodkin deep into the thing’s left haunch and Cuddy’s horse-dropper, released from a range of twelve feet, went in high on the thing’s sinuous neck just below its skull.

The wagon was an organ playing a discordant wail of terror. Its team bolted down the road.

The wyvern baulked, turned on the archers.

Father Arnaud’s heavy lance struck it under its great, taloned left arm and went in almost as far as his hand and the great thing reared back, took
two more arrows and failed to land a claw before Chris Foliak’s lance spitted it.

Ser Francis Atcourt’s lance was the
coup de grâce
, striking it in the head as its neck began to sink and its eyes filmed. It fell.

The archers whooped.

Atcourt put up his visor. “Well,” he said to Father Arnaud, “I—”

A gout of blue-white fire struck Father Arnaud. It lifted him from the saddle and slammed him to the ground.

Atcourt pulled his visor down.

Ser Gavin galloped by. “Save the children,” he roared. The first wyvern was coasting along, skimming the trees above the runaway wagon.

The captain rose in his stirrups and pointed a gauntleted fist. A beam of red light travelled an arrow’s flight into the woods and something there was briefly outlined in red.

“Damn,” the captain said.

His attack and the counter-spell were almost simultaneous. There was a detonation in front of him and his horse shied—and subsided.

He backed the horse. He had a great many tricks since the last time he’d been in a fight like this, and he cast, and cast, and cast.

A bowshot away, his opponent was silhouetted against the foliage by a matt-black wall. The creature itself—a daemon—was lit from beneath by a simple light spell cast at the ground before it and thus not susceptible to a counter.

The tree beside it exploded, wicked shards of oak as sharp as spears whipping through the air.

The adversary struck him with a gout of white fire and then another. He took both on his shields and lost both shields in the process.

“
Fiat lux
,” he said aloud, and loosed his own bolt of lightning.

But the adversary was gone, skipping across reality.

Down the road, the second wyvern stooped, trading altitude for airspeed and calculating nicely with the ease born of long and predatory success, passing just over the last overhanging tree branches before a long stretch with no cover on either side of the road for half a bowshot—a short causeway over a marsh. It plucked one of the goodwife’s children from the wagon, decapitated one of her daughters with a talon flick, took a raking blow from the oldest daughter with a scythe and banked hard, skimming low over the reeds and the beaver house and rising neatly over the trees on the north side of the road.

The panicked horses took the wagon off the causeway, and the wagon stopped, the horse team mired immediately and screaming and neighing their panic as the wave-front of the wyvern’s terror passed over them again.

Ser Gavin and young Angelo di Laternum cantered up. The run along the road was already tiring their war horses.

The wyvern consumed its prey—a simple flip of the child into the air and a spray of blood visible two hundred yards away. Cully’s long shot from the end of the causeway fell away short.

“Under the wagon!” Gavin shouted at the goodwife and her brood. “Into the water. Under the wagon!”

The goodwife understood, or had the same notion herself. Grabbing her youngest, she leaped into the icy water. It was only thigh deep.

“Dismount,” Gavin snapped at the young Etruscan man-at-arms. Both of them swung heavily to the ground and pulled heavy poleaxes off the cruppers of their saddles. Angelo had a long axe with a fine blade. Ser Gavin had a war hammer—a single piece of steel that was deceptively small.

Cuddy and Flarch ran along the causeway like athletes in a race. Flarch—one of the company’s handsomest men—never took his eyes off the banking wyvern.

Cully loosed another light arrow and scored against the wyvern, who was too low and slow to manoeuvre.

“Ware!” Cully called. He’d picked up
another
wyvern coming in from the setting sun in the west, right down the road. Four of them, now.

The squires’ charge was more successful than any of them would have hoped.

The daemon’s ambush—it certainly appeared to be an ambush—had been sprung from too close. There were three daemon warriors behind the first creatures, but they were so close behind that Toby’s charge first trampled the imps—Toby’s immediate name for the toothy monsters which had attacked the mare—but then crashed into the first of the adversaries. The beaked creature was as shocked as Toby, but his axe was faster than the daemon’s and he landed a hasty blow on the thing’s brow-ridge, cutting away a section of its engorged crest. Blood—red, too red—erupted as if under enormous pressure.