Hounds of God Read online

  Nikki could, though not easily; it cost him an instant of burning-cold pain. Alf, he said, a mental gasp. Alf, don’t waste power. Let me do it.

  Before Alf could frame a protest, Nikki had raised his own shields. Alf knew a moment of vertigo, disconcerting yet familiar, mark of the boy’s strange power. They thrust forward against a wind that was suddenly bitter, into the lash of sleet, up the precipitous path to the gate. Shielded and invisible, they passed through oak and iron into a dark courtyard. And again, bold now, through nothingness into the eye of the storm.

  It was flawlessly still. A room like a death chamber, lit by no earthly light. The King lay on the bed as on a bier, covered with a great pall of blue and silver, with a white sheen upon him and a hooded shape beside him.

  That one rose as the two entered, hood slipping back from Gwydion’s own face.

  Nikki ran to clasp Prince Aidan tightly, spinning him about with the force of the onslaught, nearly oversetting him.

  His grin put the shadows to flight; his cry would have waked the dead. “God be thanked! How did you get in?”

  How did you? Nikki stood back, looking hard at him. Anna said she saw you die. You don’t look as if you’re far from it.

  “I am now,” Prince Aidan said, “though two days ago I was lying beside my brother. When you paladins broke the power that was killing us, Morgiana dragged me up and beat life into me. But Gwydion was already past that.” His eyes glittered. “Damn you, Alfred. Damn your soft heart. How dared you reward that monster with an easy death?”

  Alf raised a brow. “Would it matter to Gwydion if Simon Magus had died in agony?”

  “It would matter to me.” Aidan’s eyes closed; he shook his head. He looked very old and very weary, and sick nigh to death. “Enough, brother. If there is aught that you can do, for God’s love do it.”

  “For God’s love,” Alf said, “and yours.” He held the Prince for a moment, catching his breath at the contact. Aidan had barely strength to stand, let alone to rage at him. “Nikephoros, take this valiant fool to the hall and feed him. And see that he sleeps after. Preferably with his Princess beside him.”

  Once gone, Nikki dragging the tall lord with inescapable persistence, they could not come back. Gwydion’s shields were too strong; and Alf’s own had risen, weaving a web even Nikephoros could not pierce.

  Alf stood by the bed. Gwydion’s state had one mercy: it preserved his body from decay. He looked much as he had when Alf left him, even to his stillness, which had the likeness of serenity.

  Alf folded back the pall. He was naked under it, his only wound that one which drained his life away. Deep but clean, all but bloodless, fresh as if the arrow had pierced it that morning. It had not even begun to heal.

  “Thank all the saints,” Alf said aloud, softly, “that the dart did not pierce the bone. And that it was not a handspan higher.” His hands passed over the wound, not touching it. No healing woke in them. He ventured a brush of power. Nothing. The King might have been armored in glass and steel.

  Without, beyond the center of quiet, the castle trembled. A creature of horror and shadow paced the halls. Men felt their bodies thin and fade, shriveling into mist.

  Alf raised his head. Death was close now. As if Gwydion had only waited upon Alf’s coming, clinging to life until the Master returned to Broceliande, and now he let the dark wings spread for him.

  He went without regret. He had lived long, he had ruled well, he had seen to the preservation of his kingdom and of his Kin. Kings dreamed of such an end; few indeed were given the grace to receive it.

  “No,” Alf said. His anger was rising. Ah, he was growing fiery, two fits of wrath in scarce three days. But he had had enough. Simon, Jehan, Nikki, Gwydion, every one stood fast against him. Every one had demanded to suffer; every one had balked the flow of healing. But healing, balked, ripened into rage. A white rage, blinding and relentless, edged with adamant.

  Alf drove it into the King’s armor, implacably, mercilessly, with all the force of his thwarted pride. He clove shield and wall, he pierced flesh and bone, he thrust at the very roots of power, that were the roots of life.

  What Simon had refused, what Jehan had denied, what Nikephoros had turned away, all those he called together, and he beset the door that Simon had closed and Gwydion’s will had barred. The wonted warmth was a cleansing fire, the wonted numbness an exquisite agony. It beckoned. It seduced. It lured him down the path that was the King’s death.

  He wrenched himself from the trap. He made a ram of his body. He drove it with wrath. The door trembled, bulged, swelled into a shape that was no shape, that had no name but blind resistance.

  The wrath mounted to white heat and transmuted into ice. Alf made it a mirror. He shaped on it an image: Maura’s face when she saw the body of her son. But it was Gwydion she looked on, shrunken in death, hands like claws on the still breast. And she must gaze, and suffer, and know that she could not follow. Her power would not allow it. Mindless shapeless obstinate animal, it knew only that it must live, and to live it must defend itself, and to defend itself it must yield to no will but its own. And for it, and for Gwydion’s own folly, she must endure all her deathless life alone.

  The mirror began to waver. The face for all its beauty was old beyond bearing, scored with grief that would never again know joy. Alf raised face and mirror together, each within each, and flung them toward the door that had risen once more to bar his way. The mirror smote it and shattered. The shards pierced the barrier, flecks of ice and silver that budded and blossomed into swords. The door trembled, buckled, fell.

  He plunged within, into a storm of heatless fire. It caught him, whirled him. He raised the last vestiges of his will and his wrath and his healing. He spoke to the heart of the madness. “Peace,” he said with awful gentleness. “Be still.”

  Alf opened his eyes upon quiet. The light of power glimmered low. The wind had fallen; the sleet yielded before the softness of snow. Gwydion’s breast rose and fell, drawing deep shuddering breaths. Deep for life’s returning, shuddering in fear of the fiery pain that but a moment before had filled all his body. But the pain had gone. The wound had closed. Even as Alf watched, it paled from scarlet to livid to watered wine to white. The King’s hand trembled upon it.

  Alf met the clouded grey stare. Gwydion’s brows drew together in a struggle to remember; he turned his head from side to side, testing its obedience. His hand traveled up to search his face. His beard, that had been close cut, felt strange; was long enough to curl. He fought to shape words. “How long—”

  Alf answered beyond words, mind to mind, all that the dimmed awareness could bear. Like a newborn child forced at first to the breast, Gwydion learned hunger; he reached, he clung, he drew greedily upon the other’s memory.

  His grip eased. He lay still. After a long while, measured in his slow heartbeats, he said, “The war will end now.” He spoke without either joy or anger, in that tone which even the strongest of his Kin had learned not to gainsay.

  Alf was a poor scholar of such prudence. “So it will, but not by your riding from end to end of Rhiyana in a blaze of power.”

  “Would I be so flamboyant a fool?”

  Alf simply looked at him, with the merest hint of a smile. Gwydion sat up unsteadily. “I would.” His voice was rueful. “I shall yield to your tyranny. My brother will go. And—”

  “Your brother is in no better straits than you. Be wise, my lord. Remember the walls and the wards.”

  The King’s eyes narrowed. His power sang softly, testing its limits and the limits of the web they had woven about Rhiyana, all of them, with Alf at their center, in the dance of the year’s turning. Simon Magus had torn great rents in the fabric; his passing had not healed them, for marauding armies filled them, and human folk driven to madness and riot, and Hounds of God in Caer Gwent itself.

  Gwydion touched the great blooming flame that was his Chancellor; the rioting fire of his brother; Nikephoros’ deceptively quiet brillian
ce, and the manifold powers of his people. And at last, with deep joy, the moon-bright splendor of his Queen. As easily, as effortlessly as a lady chooses a thread for her tapestry, slips it through the eye of her needle and begins the veining of a leaf, Gwydion gathered them all into the shaping of his pattern.

  The snow fell softly. The cold was almost gentle. Fires in cot and castle, banked until morning, swelled into sudden warmth. Hearts eased; dreams turned all to peace. But in the camps of wandering companies, in captured villages and in fortresses seized by assault or treachery, flames kindled for comfort gave birth to demons. Shadows woke to a life of fang and claw. Wolves howled; things of horror abandoned dreams for flesh. Men woke screaming to a nightmare worse than any in sleep, a land that had roused at last and turned against them. Out! roared the very stones. Begone!

  The shadows’ claws were cruelly sharp, dragging laggards and cowards from their beds. Wolves and worse nipped at the heels of horses that knew only one desire, to bear their riders across the borders of this terrible country. But the horseless moved no more slowly. Some rode helpless on the back of the wind; others ran like driven deer, swift, blind, tireless. And those who had advanced farthest, the lords and captains whose forces had eluded Rhiyana’s defenses to strike at the kingdom’s heart, knew darkness and whirlwind and terror beyond mortal endurance, and some woke mad and some woke blind or maimed or aged long years in that single night, but all woke to morning far beyond the Marches of Rhiyana.

  oOo

  The Hounds of God rested complacent. Without Simon’s power they could not know what had passed in Rome, save as mortal men know, at a full fortnight’s remove by the swiftest of couriers. Their own chosen Legate was coming, lay indeed in an abbey two days from Rhiyana’s marches. They had heard some nonsense of a royal proclamation, a denial of the Interdict and a confirmation of the Cardinal Torrino’s authority, but they credited none of it.

  “The King is dead,” said the Father General’s deputy in Rhiyana, taking his ease in his study with one or two of his brethren. “We can be sure of that. The Queen keeps up her pretense that he lives; this new folly is an act of desperation, a struggle to win the Church and the people to her dying cause. Little good it can do her, with God Himself binding her magics.”

  “And the Pope’s own Legate disporting himself in her bed.” The monk’s lips were tight with outrage, the words bitten off sharply, but the glitter in his eyes spoke more of envy than of priestly indignation.

  His superior regarded him with disapproval. “Brother, that is not charitable, nor is it proven. We cleave to the truth here. Never to mere speculation.”

  “And if it is proved, Father?”

  “We have no need of that,” the third man said with a flicker of impatience. “Whether she be an angel of chastity or the very whore of Babylon, she rides now to her fall. We have won Rhiyana. Tomorrow, I say—tomorrow and no later, let us summon her to our tribunal.”

  The monk’s lips curled. “A trial? Would you trouble yourself with such mummery? Hale her forth and burn her, and have done.”

  “Brother,” they began, almost in unison.

  The door burst open; a very young lay brother flung himself at the Superior’s feet. “Attack!” he gasped. “Army—Queen—sorcery—”

  “Impossible.” The Superior was on his feet. “Cease this babbling and explain yourself.”

  The boy had his breath back, and some of his wits. Enough for coherence. “Father, I am not raving. We are beset by a company in the livery of the Queen. The Cardinal rides before them with the Queen and another witch, with an army of wolf-familiars and a man in the armor of a Jeromite warrior bishop. And…and with the Archbishop of Caer Gwent, who is in no forgiving temper.”

  “An army indeed,” the Superior said, cool and quiet. “I hear no cries of battle.”

  “There is no battle yet, Father.” Between youth and terror and the sheer unwontedness of it all, he was almost weeping. “They command that we open the gates and deliver ourselves up. They—they say they have a mandate from the Pope’s own hand.”

  “It looks,” the third man observed with an ironic twist, “as if Her Majesty has anticipated us. She would hale us forth; I wonder, will she burn us?”

  The boy crossed himself. “Sweet Mother Mary defend us! Father, Brothers, they are terrible. They are mantled in sorcery. The bishop—the bishop who spoke for them, he bade me tell you that you will hasten, or they will fling down the gate and seize us all.”

  “They already have.”

  He was immense; he was smiling the sweet guileless smile of a child, frightening on that Norman reiver’s face. He stepped aside to admit the Cardinal Torrino and a grimly smiling archbishop and a fierce-eyed bronze-gold witch, and the ivory delicacy of the Queen. A delicacy that smote the heart even when one knew that she wore mail and surcoat like a man, and stood nigh as tall as the armored Bishop, and matched her pace to that of a wolf as great as a moor-pony.

  She took the Superior’s seat as her right, the wolf settling molten-eyed at her feet. Her own eyes were fiery gold yet strangely gentle, resting lightly upon these men who struggled not to shrink from her. For all their bitter enmity, none had yet stood face to face with any of her kind.

  “You will pardon the intrusion,” she said, “but we have tidings which could not wait upon your pleasure. My lord Archbishop?”

  With grim relish, he set the Pope’s parchment in the Superior’s hand. The Pauline priest read it slowly, with great care, without expression. When he was done he returned the writ to its bearer, calm still. But the witches knew and the men guessed what raged behind the mask. Raged and could not burst forth.

  It was all in order. Perfectly. It was all decided in the Devil’s favor. They gloated, those women who were not women, those daughters of Lilith with their demons’ eyes.

  One man found voice to speak, he who had spoken of the Queen’s adultery. “You have not triumphed,” he said low and harsh. “We are not ordered out of this kingdom.”

  “You are.” Benedetto Torrino had to fight to keep the satisfaction out of face and voice. “I so command it; and I am Pope Honorius’ voice in Rhiyana.”

  “That can be argued.”

  “That will be obeyed. I have sent messages to your false Legate. If he would not be brought to trial as an usurper and an impostor, he had best refrain from completing his journey.” The Cardinal examined each in turn. His fine Roman nostrils flared; his fine brows met. “You will join him as soon as may be. You have until sunrise to depart from this city, you and all your cattle; if by the fifth day hence this realm is not clean of your presence, I will loose its folk upon you.”

  “We fear no witches.”

  Torrino’s voice was silken. “I was not speaking of the King’s Kindred.” Almost he smiled. Almost he was kind. “You had best be quick, Brothers. Morning may be closer than you think.”

  Deliberately, meticulously, the Superior made obeisance to him, to Bishop and Archbishop, to the Queen and her familiars. “We are vowed to obedience,” he said. But he paused, face to face with Maura. “We go as we are bidden, without treachery, for we are men of honor as well as men of God. But you will have small occasion to rejoice. Our exile may endure no longer than the life of one aging Pope, and then we may return to greater victory. Your exile must endure for all of time.”

  “Perhaps not,” said the bronze witch. “The world changes. Men change. One day we may come forth again.”

  “Not in this age of the world,” said the vicar of Saint Paul in Rhiyana. “No, lady witch; your triumph rings hollow. God and His Hounds and His mortal children have won this kingdom. Not all your spells and sorceries can gain it back again.”

  He signed himself with the cross and beckoned to his companions. “Come, Brothers; we are cast forth, for a time. Let us go in what dignity we may.”

  33.

  “Tomorrow,” Alf said, “we go.”

  Jehan forgot what he had come to the Chancery for. He forgot twenty yea
rs of hard lessoning in the world and in the Church and, most brutally, in the papal Curia. He burst out like a raw boy, with a boy’s sudden terrible hurt. “It’s still the dead of winter. Rhiyana’s still in an uproar over the war. Gwydion’s heir doesn’t even know he’s—”

  “Duke Rhodri knows he will be King. Gwydion told him a long while ago, when he was a boy. Now he knows the day and the hour. Much to his credit, he’s less elated than frightened that it has come at last; and he grieves for the loss of his dear lord.”

  Words, empty rattling words. Jehan shook them out of his head. “You weren’t to go till Pentecost.”

  “We were to go no later.” Alf caught the tail of Cynan’s gown before it vanished over the threshold, and swung the child into his lap. “No, imp. No forays among my poor clerks.” He laughed at his son’s deep displeasure, and said still laughing, “Little terror; he drove Mabon the under- chancellor into hysterics by falling out of air into my lap. With his gown coming separately and somewhat later, and falling full on Mabon’s head. He’s not quite the master of his power yet.”

  “I am too,” snapped Cynan, sounding remarkably like his mother. “I hate clothes.”

  “They keep you warm,” his father said.

  “I keep myself warm.” He shut his eyes in concentration, opened them again. The gown vanished. He grinned at them both with wicked innocence.

  Alf sighed deeply. “You are a trial to your father’s soul.”

  “Your father is a trial to mine.”

  Jehan’s pain had lost its edge. Alf’s doing, damn him. “You are a conniver, do you know that? A heartless manipulator. A damned, ice-blooded, eternally scheming witch. Why won’t you let me do my hurting in peace? I’ll tell you. Because it hurts you.”

  “It does,” Alf agreed, calm as he always was when the target was only himself. “Jehan, we must go. The Pope has commanded it. For the kingdom’s welfare, for our own good, we can’t linger. Nor can we spread abroad that we go, or all Rhiyana will rise, some few to cast us forth, most to bar our way. Even yet Gwydion is well loved.” He paused for breath, for compassion. “Tomorrow the King goes hunting with his Kin on the borders of Broceliande. We will not come back.”