There Rafferdy was subjected to much scrutiny. But he repeated the words he had been given, and explained how he came by them, and before long the colonel was satisfied.
“We cannot be too particular out here,” said the colonel, a country lord whose large white mustache was stained yellow from tobacco smoke. “We need every man we can get, and no matter what side you might have been on, I warrant if we put a gun in your hand, you’ll fire it at any fellow who bears down on you. For by God, you know he’d do the same.”
After that, Rafferdy was given a rifle with a bayonet and a brown coat. He had a pistol he had brought himself from Asterlane. Rafferdy had not stated he was a lord, but that he was a man of education was apparent, and therefore it did not matter that he lacked any sort of military experience, but was at once made a corporal with ten men to command.
Not that this situation lasted for long. Two umbrals later, their position along the river was attacked in the middle of the night. Somehow the sentries had been slain without a sound being made, and a small band of the enemy had struck at the heart of the regiment’s encampment, making directly for the colonel’s tent.
All was in a great confusion as the rebels tried to rise up from sleep and ready themselves to meet the sudden attack. There was
a volley of rifle fire, and bright flashes of light sundered the darkness, forcing the rebels to hastily fall back. It seemed utterly insane for a small band to drive right into the center of a larger force: an act that would surely result in their death. Stranger yet, several men reported that the enemy had dogs with them, vicious animals that had torn out the throats of several rebels.
Then, from his position behind a makeshift barricade near the colonel’s tent, Rafferdy had seen the enemy approaching. There were three men, and slinking alongside them was a pair of humped and spiked forms. Even before the House ring upon his right hand began to throw off blue sparks, Rafferdy had been certain those things were not dogs.
What occurred then might have been a terrible massacre of the colonel and the men around him, which had surely been the enemy’s plan. The rebels opened fire upon the intruders. Bullets struck their blue coats and opened holes in their necks, but still the three men lurched forward. The shadows beside them coiled in upon themselves as if to spring.
Then all at once a voice was shouting queer, harsh-sounding words.
It was Rafferdy. Using his ring, he painted blazing runes upon the black canvas of the night air, summoning a barrier of protection. The shadowy forms leaped forward—then fell back, writhing and baring curved yellow teeth. There was a smell like burning bone. Had any of the men been looking for it, they would have detected a faint blue shimmer before them, like light reflected off a pane of glass.
“Aim for their heads!” Rafferdy called out, hardly caring that the men around were not his to command. “Shoot only their heads! Fire!”
A dozen rifles fired, then a dozen pistols followed. The skulls of the three enemy soldiers burst apart in a violent effusion. Thus decapitated, their bodies stumbled forward for a few more steps, then slumped to the ground.
By then, Rafferdy was speaking more runes, redoubling the
magickal barrier he had erected. More shots rang out; the men had reloaded their rifles. The shadows convulsed and snarled. Bullets could not kill them, but they did seem to inflict pain. Or perhaps it was the power of the eldritch magicks Rafferdy had summoned that burned them. Either way, with no one to direct them now that their masters were gone, the
gol-yagru
shrank back from the barrier, then turned and loped away, vanishing into the night.
It was over. Rafferdy had slumped to the ground, trembling. Someone made a quick inventory of the men; other than the sentries, no soldiers had been lost.
By the time dawn came, much to his bemusement, Rafferdy had been branded a hero. No one who had been there understood that he had done magick. Rather, the men spoke approvingly of how he had waved a torch to blind the intruders and ward off their dogs, then gave swift and level-headed commands in the chaos, ordering a volley of gunfire, and so surely prevented further casualties. The colonel called for him, and shook his hand, and promoted him to captain there and then.
“It is only a field promotion,” the colonel said, “and will require the signature of a lieutenant general to become permanent. But that’s not likely to happen until this entire affair is over, so for now you may wear your stripes in confidence that they are yours for the duration.”
For his part, Rafferdy had felt something less exuberant after the affair. Though they were merely bits of cloth, the stripes seemed to add a weight to his coat once they were sewn on. He had watched grimly as the bodies of four rebel soldiers, wrapped in linens rusty with blood, were lowered into the ground. After that, he had gone to the ditch into which the corpses of the three intruders had been heaved the night before.
In the dark, someone had tossed a few shovelfuls of dirt over them. Rafferdy had knelt, and brushed aside some of the thin coating of soil. As he did, he felt a compulsion to retch. The three bodies were already in an advanced state of liquefaction. It was not due to decay, though, for inside their skins was no flesh to rot,
nor bones to remain afterward. Instead, a grayish sort of gelatin oozed out of their wounds. A hand protruded from the shallow grave; beneath the crust of dirt, Rafferdy could just make out the sharp black lines drawn upon the palm.
So that was why the three men, upon entering the rebel camp, had not feared for their lives. They had already been deprived of them.
Since that night, Rafferdy had not encountered any more gray men or Ashen-slaves himself. Yet he had heard rumors and tales—things that struck most of the men as oddities, but which for him carried additional meaning. He met a man who described how his horse had been attacked by a wolf—even though wolves had not been seen outside of the remotest parts of Torland in more than a hundred years—and had managed to outride the beast. The man’s horse still bore the scabbed-over gashes on its side, and Rafferdy had counted them himself. There had been seven long, thin scores in the horse’s flank, all drawn in parallel, as if made by a single swipe of a paw. But what wolf had seven sharp claws?
Later, he heard the men repeating the story of a young rebel who had vanished from his camp, then had returned two lumenals later. With a pistol, he had shot his closest companions in the chest, killing them all. He did this with no apparent feeling or remorse, his expression blank, before turning and walking away. Those who told the tale presumed war had driven the young soldier mad. But Rafferdy wondered if anyone had noticed the young man’s hand, and if it had been marked by a dark, angular symbol.
Finally, there had been a tale recounted by a young man who joined them after traveling south from County Dorn. He had described encountering several haggard rebels who told how they had gotten lost in mountainous terrain after being separated from their company during a firefight. For days they had wandered, fearing that they would perish. Only then, in a remote valley, they had come upon a little village, and had entered it hoping to find food and shelter.
What they found instead was a thing hardly to be comprehended.
There was not a grown man or woman in the hamlet, only children. These were found not in the stone hovels, which had been crusted with ancient moss, but rather locked inside wicker pens.
“It was like the children were lambs waiting to be slaughtered, or so the men told me,” the young soldier had said. “They set the children free, but the wee things seemed to have no capacity to speak, and they only wandered to and fro, aimless and silent, as if they knew not what to do with their freedom. A terrible fear came upon the men, and they left the valley. At last, after much travel, they reached a more populous village at the foot of the mountains. They told the people there of the hamlet, and said the children would need help. But the villagers only shook their heads, and said that while there had once been a hamlet in the valley the men described, no one had come from that place nor had ventured there since the Plague Years more than three hundred years ago. The mountains, they said, were empty of any people. But if that was so, then how did those children get there?”
How indeed? And for what use?
Now, in the half-ruined farmhouse, Rafferdy looked at the House Gauldren ring on his right hand. It glinted blue, but it was only the firelight reflecting off its facets. Yet would the gem have flickered with a sapphire light all its own if he had ridden alongside the man who believed he was fleeing a wolf, or if he had stood in the camp when the young soldier with dead eyes shot his comrades? What if Rafferdy somehow found that lost village in the remotest mountains of Northaltia? Would the gem have blazed to life as he wandered among the ancient, moss-crusted hovels?
He could not know for certain. Yet from all these tales—and from the attack on the rebel encampment that he had helped to thwart—he could draw only one conclusion. The influence of the Ashen was not limited to a handful of occult orders in Invarel, or hidden in a few desert caves in the Empire. Rather, the forces of magick were everywhere.
Indeed, threads of the arcane were woven into the very fabric
of the world. How many daemons locked in magickal prisons, or artifacts concealed in ancient tombs, had felt the growing influence of the red planet, and were now beginning to stir after millennia of slumber? Ever since the previous war—the very first war—they had been waiting for their time to come again.
And it was nearly here.
“Captain Rafferdy?”
He looked up from his ring. The young rebel soldier who had taken his horse now stood in the door.
“The cook is roasting some of the beef we found on a spit. And he’s made a pudding of old biscuits and the drippings. Would you like to take a plate in here, sir?”
Rafferdy was sorely tempted to say
yes
. He was weary to the bone, and wanted nothing but to eat a little food and lie down. Then he regarded the young man’s dusty, anxious face, and he knew that, in the depths of the long night, the men could use a little reassurance.
“I had better come out,” Rafferdy said, making his voice cheerful. “We haven’t seen beef in a quarter month, and I don’t want a brawl to break out if someone thinks all they got was the gristle. Rather, if I see a disagreement, I will call for a duel at twenty paces so matters can be settled in a civilized manner, with the meat going to the victor. Just give me a moment, and I’ll be there.”
Now the young man was grinning. Rafferdy always thought his attempts at humor to be very poor, but the men seemed to enjoy them. “Yes, sir!” he said. “I’ll tell the men to clear a path of forty paces at once.”
He saluted, then departed the farmhouse.
Rafferdy found himself grinning as well. He had not believed her at the time, but as usual Lady Marsdel was exceedingly perceptive. Absurd as it seemed, given his history and habits, it turned out Rafferdy was genuinely good at being an officer. In some ways, he even found he enjoyed it. Not the countless miles spent in the saddle, of course, or the frigid sleeping conditions and miserable food. And not the long hours of boredom waiting
for an engagement with the enemy to begin, or the swift minutes of blood, confusion, and fright when it finally did.
Or was it not those things, after all? No, he could not say he enjoyed them. Still, as time went on, he found a kind of satisfaction in it. Throughout his life, Rafferdy had only ever sought ways to indulge himself. He had never imagined that to deliberately deprive himself of all comfort and safety, when done for the sake of a cause greater than himself, could be more gratifying than buying every fancy coat or silk handkerchief to be found on Coronet Street. Yet it was.
Rafferdy rose from the bench. Before leaving to join the men, though, there was one thing he needed to do. He went to the corner where he had set down his bundle of things, dug deep into it, and pulled out an object contained in a small velvet pouch. Carefully, he untied the strings on the pouch, then withdrew the object.
It was the small onyx box, its glossy sides inscribed with runes and queer symbols. Slowly he turned the box in his hands. As far as he could tell in the firelight, the box remained tightly shut. But how long would that be the case? When he first found the thing in his father’s study, it had been cold to the touch. Now it felt warm against his hand, and it seemed to twitch with a slow regularity like that of a heartbeat.
He could still picture the black, smokelike tendrils passing from Lord Baydon’s lips into the box. As soon as they had done so, Rafferdy had clamped the lid shut. The elder lord had given a sigh, and his breath had at once grown easier and quieter. Whether he would survive or not was now a matter for the doctors, but at least he had a chance.
The same would not be true for Rafferdy if the contents of the box managed to escape while it was in his possession. Yet how could such a thing be disposed of? Inside the box were the three portions of the curse which Lord Baydon had taken from Earl Rylend, Lord Marsdel, and Lord Rafferdy. All the virulence, all the malevolence, which had eaten at the three Lords of Am-Anaru—and then had consumed Lord Baydon—over long years was now
sealed within. How was Rafferdy to find a way to be rid of such a thing?
Well, he could think about it later. God knew, he would have time enough in the saddle. All that mattered for now was that the box remained sealed. He returned it to the velvet pouch and tucked it back among his things, making sure it was well concealed along with his black book. Then he left the ruined farmhouse and went to settle any disagreements over the beef.
E
IGHT HOURS LATER, they were on the march again, and still the dawn had yet to come.
While Rafferdy might have thought the men would complain about traveling again so soon, they did not. Rather, the night had grown so frigid that all were anxious to move in an effort to generate warmth. Rafferdy wondered if it would snow, but the air was too dry. It seemed to cut at his nostrils with each breath, and there was a metallic taste to it.