The Horse Lord (The Book of Years Series 1) Read online

  “Do not!”

  The two words, barely audible, shocked Aldric like the stroke of a mace. Haranil-arluth had always been a fit, strong man, even in his later years, but if health and strength had kept the life in such a ruined body they were no blessing. Then he saw his father’s eyes and realised the clan-lord had struggled to keep death at bay, hoping for his son’s return before all strength ran out. How long he had sat here, or what brought him back to wakefulness, Aldric didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

  “You. Still live. You must live.”

  Blood trickled from where the tsepan’s blade had broken skin, even though Aldric knew his hesitation – no, his fear – meant the wound was a mere pinprick. Yet that fear had let him survive to know his father lived, to hear what he had defied the darkness to say. He let go of the dirk, and felt a surge of relief as he heard its metallic clatter through the sound of his own heartbeat. Despite Haranil’s command, that relief made him ashamed.

  “Duergar did this. Betrayed us. Destroyed us.”

  The brief story made grim listening. Duergar Vathach had been a familiar figure at all hours of the day or night, and when he appeared as usual before dawn the guards had let him in. Hiding in the shadows beyond were a gang of hired blades who rushed the opened gate and sleeping citadel. They killed all who refused to yield, because Duergar was no scholar. He was an agent of the Drusalan Empire, and Clan Talvalin was a convenient host no longer needed.

  “Forget tsepan. Laws. Even honour. Help our name survive. My son…”

  Aldric clutched the old man’s hand as his father dragged in a shuddering breath. It came out again in a faint little moan as Haranil, the Clan-Lord Talvalin, in his sixty-sixth year, relaxed in his chair for the last time. Aldric felt life take its leave, released at last by the stubborn will to brush past like a movement in the air.

  His face was taut with grief and tears ran down his cheeks, but mourning had to wait. There was too much to do. He lifted the tsepan and scored its point across the scars on his left palm, cancelling all other oaths in a scarlet streak of blood and pain. It purged him of confused emotions, and he stared dispassionately at the oozing cut before putting it to his mouth and swallowing some of the copper-salty flow.

  “En mollath venjens warnan,” he said, and despite his trouble with the words for self-slaying, these words came all too easily. “The curse of vengeance be upon thee, Duergar Vathach. Thy blood for my clan’s blood. On my own blood I swear it.” Gripping his warrior’s queue in smeared fingers he slashed it off with the dirk, then did the same to each ear-lock and flung all three to the ground. The cropped hair gave him a youthful look belied by his eyes and the blood on his chin.

  “I renounce my duty,” Aldric said as each tag of hair came free. “To Heaven if it guard thee; to the King if laws protect thee; to my Honour if I fear to slay thee by whatever means I may.” The old ritual of the venjens-eijo, the avenging exile, was a death sentence for Duergar, and maybe for himself.

  Far down the corridor outside, a singing floor made its one-note cry.

  *

  For perhaps two seconds the only thing to move was a muscle in Aldric’s cheek. Then he sheathed his tsepan, snatched the taiken longsword from his father’s lap in the same movement, and shrank into the shadows just before the door opened to admit lamplight and familiar faces. Traders, they’d claimed, on their way from Datherga to Radmur with a wagonload of farming tools. Others like them had trickled through Dunrath like a rivulet of dirty water. Duergar’s raiders, one and all. With hindsight it was all so clear.

  Both had taipan shortswords at their belts over armour of a sort, and the first also wore a helmet with a half-mask visor. Aldric took cold note of that. It could help him walk unnoticed from the citadel. With his father’s taiken poised behind his head in the double-handed Guard of Justice used by executioners, he took a soft step forward, even now unwilling to strike like an assassin, but giving murderers fair warning was downright stupid. Then they got warning enough when one saw his abandoned longsword near the door. One startled word was enough for the helmeted man to look round, and Aldric cut hard and fast. Head and helmet bounced together across the floor, an unfocussed expression on the face inside, that of a man who literally never knew what hit him.

  At the end of its sweeping stroke the taiken’s blade was already in the Eagle’s Guard, ready to ward a blow at his own head or descend like rending talons. Alban swordplay shifted in blurred sequence from attack to defence to attack again, and even an alert opponent found it hard to counter. As the second raider grabbed for his own sword, steel scored a diagonal line across his body in a stroke so old it came from a time when taikenin were curved. Neither time nor a straight blade altered the result when aimed with skill and driven by rage. The mercenary’s eyes and mouth went wide with shock, and his hand flew off its wrist. Then his body split apart.

  Aldric leaned against the wall and stared at the gutted, stinking corpse. After his own near-death and the shock of everything that followed, he was close to fainting. Only raw fury had kept him on his feet, and now it ebbed away to leave him unsteady, nauseated by the reek of blood and entrails, and horrified by the revelation of his own appalling expertise. His head spun and the sour taste of vomit rose in his throat. Then as Joren had instructed him long ago, he breathed deeply despite the slaughterhouse stench and pushed the shattered dead into a compartment of his mind where they no longer mattered. As they ceased to be threatening, they ceased to be sickening, and the thought of them would no longer interfere with his survival.

  He did three more things in rapid succession. First he jammed his father’s sword into a crevice of the fireplace, threw his weight against it until the blade could flex no more and snapped in half, then returned the shards to Haranil’s lap. Then he picked up the soldier’s helmet, shook out its late owner’s head and set it on his own. And finally he spilled oil from a lamp and set light to the room, noting with grim satisfaction that not even glistening pools of fresh-spilt blood kept the flames from taking hold.

  Then he recovered his own taiken, made a salute to the funeral pyre and hurried away.

  *

  As Aldric rode from the stable a few people walked slowly across the far end of Dunrath’s courtyard, driving home that he was the only one on horseback in the whole empty space. His horse seemed to shout for attention, but even when dark smoke billowed from the donjon and an alarm began its harsh clangour, nobody showed any interest. It gave him a chance to pause near the windlass for the lift-bridge and slice his taipan blade to fraying-point into the heavy cables of its counterweighted drop-gate. There were no guards in sight, but the bitter wind whistling in from outside should have told him why. Just because they didn’t choose to stand in it didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  The windlass cords began to unravel and snap of their own accord, so he set heels to the horse and crossed the bridge as fast as he was able. It was barely fast enough. A rattling rumble broke out behind him, and the lift-bridge made an upward lurch so sudden and violent that his gelding had to jump the last few feet as if clearing a hedge. The massive double bang and rattle of broken parts behind him meant someone would have a lot of work before either bridge or drop-gate opened again.

  He rode straight for Baelen Forest, still unaware of the sheltering sentries, and his course was as unerring as the arrow that slammed into his back. He might have gasped, or even screamed. He couldn’t remember. His only recollection was of the world spinning away down a long polished tube with utter blackness at the bottom.

  *

  When Aldric came to his senses there were trees all around, and the horse had slowed to a walk. Even though he swayed drunkenly with every step the chestnut took, the high saddle held him in place and let him straighten up as best he could. That cold wind was still sighing past his ears, but the snow was turning slushy. At least it would make his tracks harder to follow.

  Then the trees came to a sudden end and a valley yawned before him. A
ldric tensed, knowing this place all too well, and with nowhere else to go he rode out from the tumbled light and shadow of the forest onto the exposed upper slope, listening for pursuit and hearing none. They were probably still fighting with the jammed gate. What might have been a fragile laugh formed in his throat, but faltered and died when he glanced back and saw what hung above the forest behind him.

  Away to the north-east, above Dunrath, a bloated spiral cloud was swallowing the sky. Long tendrils stretched towards the forest like some vast hand extending taloned fingers south to clutch and rend. A flicker like lightning passed through the cloud, throwing its coiling bulk into sharp relief, but he had never seen lightning that shade of vivid, venomous green.

  The champing horse finally got the bit between its teeth and took off at full gallop, flinging him backwards in his saddle, and despite the way its cantle punched against his spine he went over far enough to slam the arrow in his back against a saddlebag. It drove deep before it flexed and broke, and long before he made any cry of pain the dream-haunted dark claimed him once more.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Aldric came back to aching consciousness an unknown time later his left arm was cold and stiff, hard to move and hideously painful when he tried. But pain meant life. When he was dead he would no longer feel pain, nor love, nor joy, nor laughter. The dead felt nothing. In his present state he might as well be dead, for he was sure he would never laugh again in this life.

  But he wasn’t dead yet, nor helpless either.

  He slid clumsily to the ground and opened a saddlebag, though doing it one-handed needed ingenuity and teeth. It was worthwhile; there was a feeding-bag of grain for the horse, dried meat and wheaten bread for himself, even a stoneware flagon of wine and plenty of water from the melting slush. Recent memory and present hurt made his stomach heave after only a few mouthfuls, so Aldric queasily put the food aside and turned his attention to the broken arrow. He panted for breath as his good hand strained to grip what remained of the shaft, then whined like a hurt dog as the barb shifted in living flesh. Blood seeped through his clothes, tainting the cold air with a smell that made the horse stamp and fret.

  He clenched his teeth, closed his fist, and jerked the arrow hard. It snapped off short, he slumped forward into slush and dead leaves, and the lights went out again.

  *

  Aldric regained his senses after minutes or hours of fireshot darkness, only regaining his feet when the horse came close enough for him to use one stirrup as support. Patting the beast’s nose, he buzzed affectionate nonsense into its ears and regained the saddle after an age of effort then listened for any sound of pursuit. Baelen Forest answered only with the reassuring sounds of small living things. It was small comfort, because though it would have taken hours of work to re-rig the cables for the bridge and gate, those hours might already have passed. At least after so long they couldn’t tell where he had gone. Even he wasn’t sure any more.

  A black crow drifted overhead. When it still circled there miles later, suspicion found some room in Aldric’s mind, despite the pain that fogged it. Now he realised that when his tired horse walked anywhere the trees grew thick, the crow descended in a lazy spiral and only climbed again when its view cleared. That was no accident.

  There were a pair of telek spring-guns holstered on his saddle, not as long-ranged as a bow, but any bow required the big muscles of back and shoulders and two working arms. Aldric had just one, whose hand shook as if with fever. He rode the gelding under a dense-branched pine tree, deep into the shelter of its needled branches, then drew the right-hand telek and racked back the outer sleeve that cocked its heavy cylindrical spring. That was when he learned a telek needed two arms just as much as a bow.

  By the time the sear clicked into place Aldric was clammy with sweat from an exertion that usually went unnoticed, while overhead the crow dipped lower, straining to see. He glared at it, then at the telek, because his outstretched arm could barely support its weight and the sighting-notches wandered on and off their target like a bad joke. Finally he jammed the weapon in a fork of branch and trunk, a desperate measure that restricted his aim the way attempting a freehand shot made nonsense of it. If he failed to hit the crow first time, he would warn it that he had a long reach and it would never come close enough again. Yet it only had to come close once, and eventually it did.

  A lead-shod dart ripped up through the screen of pine needles, feathers burst from between the crow’s wings and Aldric swore, but not at his good shot. The bird hadn’t cawed as it died. It had screamed.

  And the voice of that scream had been human.

  Common sense warned against panic, against riding headlong across uncertain ground, against so many things… As if sense played any part in what he had seen and heard and done today. Instinct took over and he slammed his heels against the weary gelding’s flanks, kicking it into a gallop. The direction wasn’t important. What mattered was to get away from here.

  *

  Dead leaves and mud plastered his clothes from where he had skidded face-down across the ground. Aldric shook the whirling stars from his head, but the booming in his skull made it so hard to think…

  Then he cursed in despair because his horse, his poor faithful horse, lay on its side with heaving flanks. Its eyes rolled white with pain, and the cause was all too clear. Some small animal had dug itself a burrow and the horse’s leg had gone into it almost to the knee, then shattered like a rotted branch.

  He could do nothing for such a break, and only one thing for the horse. Kneeling by its head, he gentled it with soft words as he pulled the taipan shortsword from his belt. When the animal relaxed, trusting him, he drove the razor-keen blade into its neck and felt like a murderer. Aldric grieved for the horse far more than the two men he had killed. They were hostile strangers cut down in a flurry of fear and rage, while the chestnut had grown up with him since it was a wobbly-legged foal and he a skinny boy in his early teens. That single merciful cut was like severing a limb: kailin and mount were more than partners, and losing one diminished the other.

  There was nothing on the carcass he needed, not even the telekin. A single agonised attempt proved the heavy springs were beyond his strength, and a telek unable to shoot was no more than a clumsy club.

  Taking only some food and the water bottle, he began to walk.

  *

  By early evening of that short day the grey clouds had thickened with a promise of rain or more snow, and the cold air rasped Aldric’s throat each time he inhaled. He was exhausted. There had been no more crows, no strange sounds in the forest, and no sign of pursuit. There was no reason to be any more frightened than he was already. And yet, though he had never been afraid of the dark before, he feared the coming night.

  That was why he started to run.

  On uncertain forest ground and in the shifting evening light, a missed step soon sent his legs out from under him as if someone, some thing, had tripped him for its own amusement. He lay still for several shuddering seconds, the pain of his back almost overwhelmed by stark terror. There was no attack or even threat of it, except for what tormented his imagination, only the rustle of leaves stirred by a sluggish wind and the quiet crunch of bracken flattened by his fall. When nothing else happened Aldric hauled himself up by painful stages, fist to knee to feet. Then he staggered away.

  Flight became nightmare. Things in his mind snarled and giggled, bushes and gnarled roots took on distorted shapes, and still he ran though now his muscles were dull and his legs as slow to move as if he waded through honey. Sweat soaked him despite the cold, trickling down his face and blinding him to the hooked branches that tore at his wound. Times without number he collided with trees or fell headlong, dragging himself on by force of will and little else. His eyes took on a glazed, dead look that was ghastly in a living face.

  The dense clouds made nightfall even darker, and a small breeze carried the first few drops of rain from an iron sky. In the distance a rumble of thunder chased
the flash of its lightning across the heavens. Then he took another tumble, breaking his sword and what remained of his resolve.

  Aldric gave up at last, not running any more, only cursing the storm as it drove rain against him like a hail of arrows. When a hand reached out of the darkness and gripped his torn flesh, it brought agony and an instant of terror.

  Then the ground came up to meet him and the night slammed down on top.

  *

  Aldric struggled awake with a pounding headache, blinked with eyelids made leaden by weariness and drugs and looked around him at low wooden beams, simple sturdy furniture and soft daylight beyond fastened shutters. None of it meant a thing until he tried sitting up. A flare of pain tore through the narcotic haze, and memory returned in a confused, ugly rush.

  After a few minutes spent gathering his wits and waiting for the trembling of his hands to fade, he got out of bed. Apart from the old leather jerkin there was no sign of his own tattered, filthy garments, but the clothes laid out to replace them fitted well enough and above all, they were clean. More reassuring still was the sight of his weapon-belt with its two remaining Blades still in place. Although dressing was a lengthy operation punctuated by oaths and gasps he managed at last, slung his belt so both hilts were close at hand, then opened the door and stood blinking owlishly in a flood of pale sunshine.

  Gemmel saw him from the corner of one eye, glanced up from his book and drew breath to speak words that stumbled to silence at his first clear view of Aldric’s face. Last night a flaking crust of dirt and gore had disguised it; today it was the face of his own dead son. The Alban was shorter, his hair was darker, and where Ernol’s eyes had been a clear, honest green, this young man’s gaze was as unreadable as a cat’s, like grey flint sheathed in glacier ice, yet the likeness was close enough to tighten his throat. No matter how many pages had been torn from the Talvalin Books of Years, blood clearly lingered where ink had not.