Pasha's black eyes were bright. Her features moved through several uncertain states as she stepped toward him. "Granda"
"Stay here!" he roared, his voice harder than it had been with the dogs. "Draw the bolt when I have gone and let only those you know in."
The girl's bladder gave way and uringtshot down her dress, splashing at her feetfihe stood still, and pressed her liljjSrcogether very tightly. Her jaw and teeth started doing something behind them, like gnawing, but he did not have the time to comfort her.
The black-and-orange bitch pushed her head into his thigh as she followed him from the solar. The last thing he saw as he closed the door was the remaining two dogs moving to flank his granddaughter. He waited until he heard the charge of the bolt before he and the hound made their way downstairs.
It was full dark now and few torches were burning. Vaylo had left his rushlight in the solar and had to step carefully through the shadows. Below him he was aware of noises, of sharp calls and urgent footsteps and chiming metal. The first person he spotted coming down the stairs was red-haired Midge Pool. The young swordsman was running between the east ward and the west. Vaylo hailed him.
Midge had a lot of freckles, some of them on his lips. "Drybone spotted mounted men to the north. He's raising a party to meet them."
North? The fear ticked softly in Vaylo's chest, seemed almost to turn over and reveal itself for what it really was: recognition. Nothing but the Rift lay to the north. No Dhoonesmen or Hailsmen were out there about to knock down the door. A Bluddsman's true fate lay beyond the simple taking and defending of land and houses. A Bluddsman's true fate lay on the borders.
We are chosen by the Stone Gods to guard them.
"Wait for me," Vaylo commanded Midge Pool.
On their way to the stables, Vaylo arranged the securing of the fort. Aaron was located and sent up to Nan's solar in the company of Mogo Salt. Just as Mogo and Aaron were about to leave the ward, Vaylo stopped them.
"Your father's hammer."
Mogo nodded with understanding and returned to his bedroll, where his gear lay. Like all the men in the fort this day Mogo was a swordsman, but his father Cawdo had been handy with a hammer and he had taught Mogo a thing or two about hatchet-wielding. He had also left him his hammer. Vaylo ill-liked commandeering a man's weapon, but in this case it was not Mogo's primary armament. The five-foot longsword holstered at his back was the weapon Mogo Salt would draw in a melee.
"I don't have the cradle or chains," Mogo said handing the wedge-shaped hammer to his chief.
"Less to rattle," Vaylo said, winking at his grandson. "I thank you, Mogo Salt, son of Cawdo. Fetch Nan. Watch my grandchildren."
Mogo bowed formally at the neck. "Chief."
Vaylo left them, and hurried down the stairs to the stables. He'd lost Midge Pool somewhere along the way but the bitch was still at his heels.
Through a throng of men saddling hfies, checking cinches, and harnessing swords, Vaylo Bludd met gazes with Cluff Drybannock. The flame blue eyes were always a shock. The|Batenseness of them, the fuel that burned there.
"What do we face?" Vaylo asked his fostered son as he came toward him. Drybone was wearing the red wool cloak with the owl-feather collar and the lead weights sewn in to the hem. The opal bands that bound his waist-length hair glowed like coronas around the moon. "Nine mounted. They head from the direction of the Field of Graves and Swords."
Nine. Vaylo looked into the holes at the center of Dry's eyes and saw his worst fears confirmed. He said, "We ride with thirty. I will not leave this fort undefended." His name was Vaylo, not Pengo, Bludd.
"Aye." Cluff Drybannock nodded tersely, went off to make the cull. The wolf dog trotted after him.
Vaylo saddled the black stallion. The beast was skittish and eager; it nipped his hand as he fastened the nose piece. Behind him, he was aware of men disappointed, of grumblings, and hay-kicking. A slammed door. Do not rush to your own destruction, Vaylo wanted to tell them. If Angus Lok was right they stood at the sunset of the long night. There'd be time enough to get killed in the years of darkness to come.
"Bludd!" Vaylo hollered as he swung himself atop the horse. "We are chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders. Death is our companion. A life long-lived is our reward." Raising his hammer high in the air, Vaylo led the charge from the west ward.
Hooves clattered behind him. Men shouted, "Bludd! Bludd! Bluddl" Harness leather creaked and sawed. The cold night air snapped at Vaylo's skin, bringing hair upright and raising hard white mounds of gooseflesh. Cawdo's hammer felt a couple of pounds too light and about half a foot too short. Its balance was off-center and the head swung like a seesaw. Vaylo wondered if it hadn't been designed for throwing.
Gods, but it was raw. The snow underfoot crackled as if it held a charge. Pressure was dropping and the air had that loose changeable feeling that meant something was coming in. Big Borro had probably been right about snow.
Vaylo headed north into the valley, the bitch at his horse's hoofs. The land was open here, without trees or tall shrubs to break the view. All was blue. Overhead clouds held streaks of light. Dry rode close to his back, his lean and sinewy stallion effortlessly keeping pace. He had not drawn his sword yet, though others in the line had. When Vaylo turned his neck to get a better look at his fostered son he saw someone who looked wholly Sull.
"West of the Field of Graves and Swords," he said, seeing movements in the dark blueness that Vaylo did not.
Tightening his left rein, Vaylo made the shift in course. The snow hit as they rode out of the north wall of the valley and up to the headland. Flakes the size and shape offish lures began to fall.
Vaylo spotted the horsemen as he topped the ride. Nine, as Dry had said. They rode horses of black oil whose bodies rippled on the edge between solid and liquid like something seen through thickly distorted glass. The men, if you could call them men, were armed with blades that killed air. Snowflakes were sucked in, and nothing came out The men's calls were high and terrible birdlike screeches that raked the nerves like knives. Their bodies existed on a plain where shadow could support weight. Their feces were no longer recognizable as human. Skin and features were black and sucked inward, distorted by dark hungers Wrong about the hammer too. For he could bash the shadow men with it but could not stop them. One fell from its horse and continued fighting afoot, its blade of voided steel mercilessly hacking horseflesh. Vaylo dropped the hammer. "Dry," he called out to the man who had never left his side during the battle. "Fetch me that sword."
It was a sword dropped by a young Bluddsmen who would never again use it. A good plain weapon that had not once found shad-owflesh; the blade was perfectly silver.
"My lord and father," Dry said, presenting his mighty six feet longsword to Vaylo Bludd.
"No," Vaylo said softly. Cluff Drybannock was holding the blunt of the blade in his fist, offering the crosshilts. As a beast horse charged them, Dry thrust the sword into his father's hand.
Vaylo took it and wrested it into jerking motion. He had forgotten all it took—the balance, the space, the wrist and arm coordination—to wield such a blade. Gamely, he drove his horse forward. Dry must be shielded while he found himself a weapon.
It was hell. The oily black forms of the horses— The screeches. The snarling of the wolf dog and the bitch as they danced around the only two people they cared about in the melee, tearing shadowflesh, launching themselves at throats, shaking their heads like the insane. Snow was everywhere, in Vaylo's eyes, on his sword blade, jammed in the cavities between his bared teeth.
When one of the dark riders made a lunge for Drybone, Vaylo punched his sword forward and twisted it into shadowflesh. It was possibly the ugliest move ever made with a longsword, more suited to knife brawls than swordcraft, but somehow the tip entered at exactly the right angle to slide the blade into the heart.