The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron
The secretary shook his head. “She went to a house she has in the country. I sent men. They did not return.” He shrugged. “It has become difficult to hire sell-swords, Eminence. The King’s Guard has hired every armed thug in the city.”
“That’s de Vrailly, preparing for a fight with the commons,” the archbishop said. “We need our own swords. Some swords that don’t wear our livery.”
The secretary nodded. “A man was recommended to me, Eminence. A foreigner, from the far north.”
“Well?” The archbishop was not renowned for his patience.
“I will see if I can contact him. He is very—careful.” The secretary shrugged.
The archbishop smiled. “He sounds Etruscan. Etruscans are the only professionals in these matters. I wish I’d brought a team from Rhum. If he seems suitable, retain him.”
The secretary bowed.
The Count D’Eu was moving briskly about Harndon, paying his debts. Tailors and grocers and leatherworkers and all the trades who supported his household, he visited in person and paid in silver.
Many a Harndoner who cursed Galles every day had reason to bless him, and Gerald Random shared an embrace. “It’ll turn,” he said, somewhat daring. “You should stay.”
The count met his eye. “No,” he said. “It will not turn. Ward the Queen. They mean her harm. And the King, in time, I think.”
“And you will just leave?” Ser Gerald said. He held up a hand. “I know—”
The Galle shook his head. “No, Monsieur. I know you are a good homme d’armes and an honest merchant. So I will only say this: the rumour from my home is that the Wild is coming to my doorstep. I wish to go home and do the work for which God has chosen me.”
Ser Random bowed. “Can’t say fairer than that,” he said.
At the door, the Count D’Eu slapped his magnificent gold plaque belt and turned to his squire, Robert. “Young man, what have I done with my gloves?”
Robert looked around wildly. “You had them, my lord. You wore them when we were in the tailor’s. With the bishop’s men.”
The count frowned. “Eh bien,” he said.
The sun was setting over the distant mountains when the Gallish ships appeared in the firth. Word spread up through the town—almost every man from the corner beggars by the Order of Saint John’s almost empty hostel to the Royal Guards on the walls knew what the ships contained. Men and women went to evening mass with their eyes on the firth.
They made the riverside docks only at first light—the packed men onboard had had to endure one more damp, cold night. But in the bright sunshine of a spring morning, the first day of Holy Week, the ships unloaded onto the same quays where the Venike round ships had unloaded and marketed their wares. But whereas the Venike brought silk and satin and samite and spices, the Galles brought more than three hundred lances of Gallish chivalry—big, tall, strong men. Each Gallish lance contained a knight and his squire, also armoured, and a rabble of servants and pages, in numbers that varied according to the social status of the knight.
The Sieur Du Corse, a famous routier, led the Galles down the gangplanks, and then stood, a baton in his hand, as the ships disgorged his men, their armour, their weapons, and all their horses. The horses were not in good shape, and some were unable to stand.
The King’s Champion, Jean de Vrailly, came in person, mounted and in a glittering new harness, the one of blued steel he would wear for the tourney. He was cheered in some streets.
He dismounted easily and embraced Du Corse, and they mimicked friendship with the slippery grabs of men covered in butter—steel arms grappled steel breasts. But the display seemed genuine enough.
“I asked for a company of Genuans. For some bowmen—or Ifriquy’ans like the King of Sichilia uses.” De Vrailly pursed his lips. “But your lances look fine, Blaise. Magnificent.”
Blaise Du Corse was as tall as de Vrailly, with hair as black as de Vrailly’s was white-gold. He was from the southern mountains of Galle, where the Kingdom of Arelat and the Kingdom of Galle and the Etruscan states all came together in a region of poverty and war and uncivil society. A region famous for soldiers.
“Ah, my lord. Truly, I meant to bring you more, but our liege the King has forbidden it. And more particularly, your friend the Senechal de Abblemont has forbidden it.” Du Corse shrugged. “I almost didn’t come. And Jean.” He put a hand on de Vrailly’s arm. “We have to go back. As soon as we’ve done the King’s work here.”
“Back?” de Vrailly said.
“There’s an army of the Wild in Arelat,” Du Corse said. “No—spare me, sweet friend. I’ve seen some heads. No fearmonger could create such a thing. They say that the Nordikaans have war on their very borders. They say that the Kingdom of Dalmatis is already fallen.”
“Blessed sacrament!” De Vrailly took a deep breath. “And the King? And the seneschal?”
“Are raising the whole of the Arrièrre Ban. Every knight in Galle will go east before midsummer.” Du Corse raised both eyebrows. “So I am told to say, privately, hurry.”
They watched a dozen sailors and longshoremen winching a heavy war horse up out of the belly of the largest round ship.
“Abblemont wished to point out to you,” Du Corse continued, “that you have almost a thousand of our kingdom’s lances. A tithe of our total strength, and in many cases”—Du Corse grinned—“the best men.” His eyes went to a young woman on a balcony, waving. “What a pretty girl. Is Alba full of pretty women?”
De Vrailly frowned. “Perhaps. Midsummer? Bah. Well—we will see.”
Du Corse frowned, but it was more a comic face than an angry one. “I cannot see anything here that can stand against a thousand of our kind,” he said. He winked at someone over de Vrailly’s shoulder.
A full bowshot away, the archbishop turned from the windowed balcony of his Harndon episcopal palace. He smiled easily to his secretary. “So—we have enough iron to hold the streets. Please tell Maître Villon to see that it is done.”
“See that what is done?” asked his secretary.
The archbishop smiled. “Best you not know, my son,” he said.
He sat at his desk and reviewed a set of documents he had had prepared. Each of them bore the bold signature and seal of the Count D’Eu.
He sighed, and inserted them, one by one, with his own hands into a small leather trunk—the sort of box lawyers used for scrolls and wills.
He locked the trunk, and threw the key into his fireplace. Then he rose. “I will be attending the King,” he told his chamberlain, who bowed.
Desiderata had spent three whole days in prayer, most of it on her knees. She was a strong, fit woman and by her arts had more knowledge of the babe within her than most midwives might have managed, so her piety no more affected her than to make her wish for better cushions on her private prie-dieu, where she knelt in front of a magnificent picture of the Virgin in a rose garden.
She spent a day perfecting her ability to read aloud from her Lives of the Female Saints and Legends of Good Women while moving about inside her inner palace. It was far more difficult than she had originally expected—reading aloud clearly occupied more of the waking mind than she had thought.
Despite which, by midday on the second day, knees aching like fire and her back near to separating from her breastbones with the pain of kneeling, she had it. She needed the outward show of piety to cow her new “ladies,” all of whom were spies, and none of whom had the brains of a newborn kitten.
The Queen knew she was in difficulty. The world around her had moved from long shadows to open war; her people were all gone except Diota, and she knew that an open, legal charge of adultery was in the works.
They had even stooped to attack her laundrywoman. The charge—of sorcery—was absurd. But it had effectively isolated her. Without knights or squires or any ladies she could trust, she had no word from the outside.
The archbishop might have been shocked to know that the Queen scarcely troubled herself abou
Instead, she bent most of her conscious thought to the dark thing that dwelt in the palace foundations. Or perhaps merely visited them.
Somehow, it was her enemy. She had known this the moment she touched it, deep in the old corridors where Becca Almspend had taken her. Its enmity was as familiar as the touch of a lover. She wondered if she had awakened it with her touch, or Becca with her hermetical studies. Or whether it was always there. Some days it seemed completely to be absent.
She bit her lip. Her outward self almost lost the thread of the passage she was reading aloud—she fought down a wave of petty pains—her breasts, her hips, her back, her knees.
Any thought of her husband hurt her to her core.
Almost, she could accept the charge of adultery. Because in one short year, she had come from love to something very like hate. A cold, menacing hate. A hate that chewed at the edge of her waking mind and threatened her powers and her confidence and her very awareness of herself as herself.
And again, as surely as old Harmodius had banished the daemon, she banished her thoughts of her husband and locked them away.
And followed the thread of black that ran from her rooms down into the depths of the palace.
No one had ever taught the Queen to walk free of her body, but it had seemed perfectly reasonable to her, since she was very young, that if one could invert the normal, ordering one’s palace, one could walk free through a door in that palace and out into the waking world. And as was often the case for Desiderata, the thought was the action, and she had attempted it.
Now she walked the winds almost at will. And hence this gentle and pious deception—the ladies all watching her in amazement as she spent her days in prayer. Her careful practice—it could be quite painful to be interrupted when walking abroad.
With a last, inward check and a mental sigh, she released her hold on her temporal body and drifted clear.
Lady Agnes was kneeling with her ample behind firmly seated on a stool hidden in her skirts. This did not amuse or disturb the Queen—she merely noted it. She had noted before that the world of colour and high emotion that was her life in the real was muted when she let her spirit walk the winds.
She allowed herself to sink through the floor.
She knew from experience that many parts of the palace were warded—indeed, almost every home, even the lowliest peasant’s cot, had wards to protect the inhabitants against ghosts, not-dead and wind-walkers.
Oddly, many such wards were placed on doors but not walls, on windows and not on floor joists. She knew—with some bitterness—that she could not escape the bounds of the palace. It was a warded fortress, and what was in would stay in just as surely as that without would stay out.
But inside much of its confines she could move at will, if she kept her concentration pure. She felt the extreme cold of stone that never saw the sun, and then she was warmed—a floor below, the Royal Chamberlain saw to the King’s chamber as his clean sheets were set to his bed.
She did not linger to see what sign there might be of other women. She needed no further proof of who the King was. Or what he had done.
Almost, that scrap of thought was enough to destroy her concentration. But Desiderata’s will was a pure, hard thing like eastern steel, and she went down, and down again, bands of light alternating with darkness as she went into the old halls below the palace, always following the black thread that she had found in her own fireplace.
But when she entered the deep corridor—the old path, or road, that Lady Almspend had first showed them—it was like returning to a house from a trip to find that mould and rot had set in. The corridor was so full of the black ropes of the twisted thing’s sorcery that she was almost entangled.
She was not quiet enough.
The blackness was everywhere—and she hovered above it, unwilling to touch it even in incorporeal form. But she could see it with a true sight, and see how much of it there was—enough thread to make a hundred carpets, piled in loops and whorls throughout the deepest corridor, and there, where she had stopped it with Almspend and Lady Mary, stood a wall of black.
Twice before, Desiderata had come here and driven the walls back to their origin, the stone set in the oldest wall of the castle.
Now it knew her.
The threads came at her, all at once—an infinity of black silk flying through black air like a dark net.
Desiderata set her aethereal form on the level with the floor and allowed the silk threads to permeate her non-being.
Whatever had prepared this trap had expected a more solid body.
She felt its hate.
She took in a great breath, and as she exhaled, she made her breath the very spirit of spring, filled with sun and light, love and laughter, green leaves and new flowers and the smell of grass in the sunshine and lilacs in the dark.
Her conjuring drove back the threads as easily as a good sword would cut through snow—more, as the threads melted as they contacted her force, withering, retreating and unmaking as she advanced.
She spread her incorporeal hands.
Between them a great globe of glowing gold began to form.
“Give us the babe!” whispered the ribbons of black.
She gave them the globe, instead. And it floated forward, like a sun, a veritable sun, burning and lighting with a brilliance that no mortal eye could tolerate.
It passed the wall of black—and illuminated it.
A mighty pulse of power struck at her, like a child swatting a fly, and she rose on the energy and retreated before it, her own casting burrowing like a woodworm into the coils of her adversary.
Once more it struck, this time with a ravening dog of many heads and teeth—a slavering horror that emerged from the wreckage of the black aethereal curtain—to savage nothing but a ghost.
She felt the entity respond—and understand.
It lashed at her with pure ops.
The ramifications of the blow flung her out of the corridor and almost as far as the living world.
Only then did Desiderata begin to know fear.
But fear usually made her stronger. She controlled the flight of her incorporeal form and steadied it—laid a trap in the aethereal for any immediate pursuit and saw with savage satisfaction that her guess was correct.
And still the entity was incapable of quenching her initial casting.
She fled to the real, hoping that her work was done.
In the real, her aching body was still kneeling, and her lips still moved. Saint Ursula. She knew the tale all too well. Her consciousness snapped back into the body in time to prevent a collapse.
She could not prevent her head from falling forward over the book.
Far beneath her, she could feel her great praxis moving, like a living thing, into the very heart of her adversary’s darkness.
“If your grace is done praying,” Lady Agnes said, her voice a whine of accusation, “I’m sure we have tasks before us!”
Whatever else might have been said was interrupted by the chamber doors being flung wide.
There, framed in the doorway, was the Archbishop of Lorica. At his shoulder was the King’s new chancellor, the Sieur de Rohan, and behind them—almost in shadow—the King.
She started to rise, and her knees and back protested so that she almost fell. She—the most graceful of women—pinned by her pregnancy. She fought the urge to whimper, gritted her teeth, and forced herself to her feet. The archbishop’s every sinew expressed his excitement. Never before had Desiderata so completely seen expressed the phrase trembling with excitement. It was as if the man had a fever.
De Rohan, de Vrailly’s former standard bearer and most dangerous minion, was, by contrast, almost bored. Merely fulfilling the function to which he’d been appointed.
And the King—his face was almost slack. His eyes flickered.
Oh, my love. When did you become so weak? Or were you always so?
“Your grace!” said the archbishop. His voice, always high, was shrill. He calmed himself. “Your grace. I come before you with a writ signed by the King.”
“Yes?” she said. While she knew what it must be, she had, in her heart, expected the King to refuse to sign it.
The archbishop produced a writ. She could see the King’s seal.
“I arrest you for the treason of murder with sorcery,” he said, his voice loud and piercing.
She was taken by surprise. “Murder? With sorcery?” she asked, as if struck by lightning.
“That you did work the death of your lover, the Count D’Eu, by the arts of Satan, when he renounced you as a lover and threatened to leave the court and reveal you!” said the archbishop.
Her so-called ladies hastened from the room, leaving her alone.
“Search her room,” muttered de Rohan. He had with him a dozen Royal officers—all recent appointees, and no members of the Royal Guard at all.
“This is infamous,” the Queen said. “Untrue, foolish, and pernicious.” She paused. “The Count D’Eu is dead?” she asked. She remembered his hard arm under hers at the Christmas revel on the ice.
The King stepped forward from his place behind his officers. “Madame,” he said gravely, “I’ll do you the honour of pretending that you do not already know.”
Desiderata didn’t back a step. “Tell me, then,” she said flatly.
“We have all your letters to him,” the King said, the ire in his voice now openly menacing.
A royal sheriff handed a leather trunk to the archbishop. He tried to open it, found it locked, and handed it back to the sheriff.
“That’s none of mine,” said the Queen. “That is not mine, and not—”
“Silence, woman!” said the King.
“Your grace, you know where I keep my letters!” the Queen said.
The King looked away. “I do not know you at all,” he said sadly.
With a snap, the little leather trunk opened, and a dozen parchments fell to the floor. The sheriff put his baselard back into its sheath.