Hounds of God (41 page)

She came in the disconcerting fashion of the Kindred, all at
once, out of air, settling herself with eastern serenity. When Torrino passed
the door, she was enchanting her charges, quite literally, with a dance of
crimson fire.

oOo

The King lay as he had lain for many days, in his castle of
Carmennos half a league from the March of Anjou. His power in its throes had
wrought wonders and terrors within those walls; dreamworld and solid world lay
side by side, and the air shifted and shimmered with the flux of his pain. When
his mind was clearer he had sent the human folk away, all but those whose love
overmastered their fear. They guarded him; they gave him what care he would
permit, and manned the walls against enemies who did not come. That much his
power did for them. It drove back any who willed harm to castle or people.

And any who willed help. Alf, barred from Gwydion’s
presence as completely as any Angevin bandit, stood outside in the dark and the
storm and gathered his own power. Already he was cloaked in it, shining with
it. Wind and sleet had no strength to touch him.

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 brilliance, 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.”