Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles (7 page)

Ronin tactfully refrained from pointing out that since Princess Solveig of Grïmnørsland had been betrothed to Kieran at the age of three months, she could hardly be accused of employing petticoat wiles to snare a husband.

“It is bad enough that you send him away, but to dispatch Gearnach with him! That man is a fire-eater!” the queen protested in tears. “Let not my boy be assigned to the care of a daredevil!”

“Two-Swords will make a fine nursemaid,” the king rejoined with a chuckle.

At the time, it had been Uabhar’s dismissal of his mother’s entreaties that had led Ronin to believe his father was inherently numb to her passions. In later years, as he approached maturity of understanding, the prince had come to conjecture that just
possibly
his father had been blind in another way entirely, and that he himself had also been taken in. For it occurred to him, from a casual word dropped here and there, that his mother had actually
engineered
Kieran’s sojourn in Grïmnørsland. She never admitted to it, and he never quizzed her, but he knew full well that she looked with satisfaction on the years his elder brother had spent in the western kingdom, quietly pleased
that at least one of her sons had, for a time, escaped what she considered to be a stifling atmosphere, and a hotbed of machinations and base influences: the court of Slievmordhu.

Beneath the rustling elms Ronin spoke gently to the agitated queen, as if in apology. “Father means well, Mother,” he said. “He has taught us the value of honesty and openness; he has instructed us to be loyal, and never to lie to him, wherefore we have grown up to be honorable men.”

Saibh nodded. She swallowed her queasiness and managed to smile wanly. “Indeed you have both grown to be men of principle,” she said, “and loving sons also. Some day you will make fine husbands.” To Kieran she said, “Solveig Torkilsalven will be a happy wife.”

But Ronin, asleep in the hunting lodge thought of his brother’s promised bride with a pang of love and longing. Sweetened by an image of her pretty face in a cloud of golden hair, his visions faded into slumber.

In Grïmnørsland a band of Marauders lay dead, but far away on the other side of the Four Kingdoms, the main clan thrived. The Great Eastern Ranges, which separated Slievmordhu from the uninhabited South Eastern Moors, were perforated with a complexity of excavations and natural warrens. Many of these caverns sheltered groups of human creatures loosely connected by amorphous and slippery social bonds. Supernatural wights were scarce in the Eastern Ranges, and seldom troubled those cave-dwellers. Human they were, these troglodytes, but bizarre and un-human in aspect.

Marauders were outcasts. Their ancestors had been outlaws and misfits seeking secret places to hide, using them as bases from which they could launch surprise raids on the law-abiding citizens of the Four Kingdoms. As years passed, the descendants of the original population became altered in appearance and personality, growing ever more bellicose, brutish and fierce. Why this should be so was not certain, but it was said that some vile poison, or unseelie force, or toxic gas, slow-simmered beneath the mountains in that region, and it was further reckoned that this mysterious influence seeped gradually into the flesh and bones of those who dwelled in the caverns, twisting them, misshaping their offspring, until the population came to resemble nightmares rather than ordinary humankind. Some of them had grown unusually gigantic of height and breadth, and as strong as oxen or draught-horses. Although the alterations made them as hideous as the
most repulsive of eldritch wights, the Marauders remained human, and possessed not a whiff of supernatural power or immortality.

In the Main Cave of a network of interconnected ventricles infested by a loose-knit clan, or comswarm, that frequently, but not invariably, called itself “The Sons of Blerg,” two Marauder captains were planning their next foraging foray into the countryside. The cavern, although draughty, cold, damp and bereft of creature comforts, teemed with men and youths. Unwashed, clad in an assortment of filthy animal skins and stolen finery, they squatted around small fires playing at knucklebones, sharpening weapons, picking their remaining teeth or multiple rows of fangs, or brooding in sullen silence. Smoke collected in suffocating billows beneath the high ceilings. Now and then an unexpected gust of wind from some rocky orifice would send the fumes blasting down to the cavern floor, where it swirled amongst rising clouds of ash and sparks, engendering bouts of coughing and cursing and slapping.

“Oi still say we should ‘it that village jest across the Ashqalêth border,” Captain Ruurt was saying to his fellow captain. “Last toime we got good pickin’s there. Cracked a lotta heads, too. Good sport.”

“Nah, that’s too far away, ya block’ead,” replied Captain Krorb. “Go fer somethin’ closer, I say. Loike some place on the Mountain Road or the Lake District.” He scratched at his third ear, a sanctuary for fleas.

“We orways go for
them,”
argued Ruurt, spitting into the fire. “Too much work, not enough fun. They got their defenses built up, these days. They got their lookouts, and sojers.”

“Not fer much longer, if them soft’eads can be trusted to keep their word, eh?” Krorb uttered a cackle of laughter.

“Can’t depend on that. Gotta try further off. That swarm from up Capstone way, whadda they call ‘emselves? The Seed of Havoc?”

“Yeah, Seed of Havoc. Good name. Better than ‘Sons of Blerg.’ ”

“Yeah, them. Some ‘o their gangs go out as far as Grïmnørsland, I ‘eard.”

“The further off we go the more loikely we’ll be spotted boy some nosy weather-squeezer in one o’them sky-balloons.”

“What’s the matter? Lost ya nerve?” The color of the bulbous growth on Ruurt’s forehead transmuted from raw pink to congested purple, always a sign his temper was on the rise.

Krorb was in the process of formulating a suitably scathing response when a terrible scream ripped through the local smoke-haze. Heads jerked in the direction of its source, and there was a sudden flurry as men leapt to
their feet—or other extremities used for locomotion—and fled away from the darker recesses at the back of the cavern. They huddled in fear, as far from the back wall as they could get, cowering and staring into the gloom.

Whispers rippled amongst them.

“The Spawn Mother . . . ”

A second wild yell pierced the air, growing fainter as if traveling fast-paced along a tunnel that led away from the Main Cave, which in fact it was. The Spawn Mother had abducted yet another unwary man.

Marauder women were as pleasant to look upon as the men. In character they tended to be a little less violent; were this not the case they would eventually have slaughtered their own issue, and the comswarms would have died out years before. Most of the women—who lived communally with their brats, in caves separate from the men—possessed sufficient nurturing instinct to care for their offspring until they were old enough to fend for themselves.

Not so the Spawn Mother.

This gigantic progenitrix lived in a deep cave, and stole men as she pleased, when they ventured into the lairs near her abode, or when she wandered the network of tunnels. Most often, these abductees were never seen again. The litters haphazardly produced and abandoned by the Spawn Mother had to be removed by the other ghastly females while she was sleeping, or she would devour her own progeny as she probably devoured their fathers. Her children grew up to be the largest, fiercest, most demented killers amongst the Marauders; so berserk they had to be raised in cages to ensure the longevity of the community.

Silence now reigned in the Main Cave.

“Reckon that was fat-for-brains Scroop,” muttered a voice. “I seen ‘im go over t’wards the Steep Passage not long ago.”

“No, it wozzen me,” shrilled an anxious second voice, apparently belonging to Scroop. “Reckon it woz Grak.”

“ ‘Twozzen me noither,” quavered the equally timid Marauder known as Grak. In an attempt to appear insouciant he shrugged lopsided shoulders. “Dunn o who.”

After a long while the men began to breathe easily again. They shuffled back to their fires and resumed their previous occupations, but presently their tranquillity was disturbed once more, this time by Captain Ruurt, who barked, “Look sharp, slag-piles, we gotta head down to the lake camp. Gotta moiting with them soft’eads.”

Stars were putting forth their glittering needles in the eastern skies and hanging suspended above the wooded shores of one of the Great Lakes of Slievmordhu, where stood the ruins of a mighty fortress. Argent light frosted broken battlements and walls of crumbling stone. Ominous shadows huddled in interstices. On the north side, the waters dimly mirrored the decaying shell of the stronghold, which long ago had been the bastion of some proud chieftain. This was the meeting-place near the lake camp of the Marauders.

That same night, at this secluded location, far from the clustered habitations of humankind, a secret meeting commenced to take place. Dimly against the tranquil lapping of the waters there came a tintinnabulation of bridle and stirrup. A small party of armed horsemen arrived from the west, moving warily through the smashed architecture to halt beneath a corroded tower. Their clothing was nondescript; dark-dyed cloaks and hoods covering yeoman’s garb; yet, curiously, they rode in formation and sat their steeds with uniform ease and grace. Most remained astride their horses, while their captains dismounted and held discourse with the leaders of a second company, which had approached from the opposite direction.

Those with whom they rendezvoused were grisly of face and form. If the identity of the riders was veiled, the pedestrians, at least, were easily recognisable as Marauders out of the eastern caves, swathed in their clots and membranes of rags and millinery and assorted haberdashery, and well accoutred with weapons. To the rear of the group, Scroop and Grak, the timid pair, furtively jostled for last place.

The leaders of each party faced one another, mutual loathing evident in every line of their posture. Yet they were treating together almost as if they were allies instead of traditional enemies.

“As promised we will arrange for security to be lax during that period,” the drab-cloaked captain of the riders was saying. “If you attack before or after, you will face much stiffer opposition. Therefore it is in your interests to be punctual. Have you any further questions?”

Stone-faced, the leader of the Marauders, who towered over the man, gave a grunt and extended an acquisitive talon. “Where’s the gold?”

“You will be reaping a fortune in bounty from your raids,” the foremost horseman said. A bold fellow, he stared scornfully up at the hulk who loomed over him. The Marauder’s height, like that of so many swarmsmen, was close to seven feet. “Do you really expect us to
pay
you for it?”

Captain Ruurt of the Sons of Blerg scratched his head with his class. As he did so, his upper eye rolled uncontrollably in his head, like a stray marble at the bottom of a moving donkey cart. “Orroight,” he said, “it’s a deal. Ya know what’ll happen if ya ever double-cross us.”

The expression on the horseman’s face did not alter. Straight-backed and austere, he stepped away from the Marauder captain. “We expect your cooperation,” he said formally. “Good evening.”

“Good evening,
sir.”
The Marauder captain was unable to suppress the hint of a sneer, but the rider appeared oblivious of it. He turned and sprang up on the back of his mount. With a gesture of command to his men he led them out of the tumbled stones, away into the benighted woodlands.

The Marauders too turned their backs on the ruins and began to make their way through the trees along the lakeshore toward their local bivouac. Scroop and Grak scuttled ahead, eager to place as much distance as possible between themselves and the horsemen. Ahead, the crescent moon hovered above the mountains.

“ Yer makin’ us into puppets of that misbegotten puke-stockin’,” Krorb muttered into an aperture in the side of Ruurt’s head. “Oi don’t wanna be that.”

“Are you mad? The fools are payin’ us to do what we do best. What more could we ask?”

“Oi don’t loike it.”

“Well it suits me roight enough. It’s easier, plunderin’ this way.”

They reached their bivouac before dawn and threw themselves into their purulent bedrolls. When the morning sun flared, and a flock of crows passed overhead, they were still snoring.