He grinned in satisfaction and snapped his fingers. Every moth in the great inn fell to the floor, dead.
Sarah laughed. “Now that’s a trick,” she said. “How about mice?”
Her son, just four months old, looked at her with goobering love and tried to find her nipple with his mouth.
Gabriel laughed. “As I was saying, the magister who now styles himself Thorn, once known as Richard Plangere, led an army of the Wild against Lissen Carak. He enlisted all the usual allies: Western boglins, stone trolls, some Golden Bears of the mountain tribes and some disaffected irks from the Lakes; wyverns and wardens. All of the Wild that’s easy to seduce, he took for his own. He also managed to sway the Sossag of the Great House, those who live in the Squash Country north of the inland sea.”
“And they killed Hector! God’s curse on them.” Sarah’s hate for Hector’s killer was as bright as her hair.
The Red Knight looked at the young woman and shook his head. “I can’t join you in the curse, sweeting. They have Thorn as a houseguest, now. They left him, you know. And-” He looked at the Drover. “The Sossag and the Huran would see us as the murdering savages who stole their land.”
“A thousand years ago!” Bad Tom spat.
Gabriel shrugged. At his back, Ser Alcaeus was playing a kithara from the ancient world and singing an ancient song in a strange, eerie voice. Because every word he sang was in the true Archaic, the air shimmered with ops and potentia.
Ser Michael slipped under the gate of the bar and found space to lean. Kaitlin, his wife, now so heavily pregnant that she waddled instead of walking, was already snug in one of the inn’s better beds. Behind him, Sauce-Ser Alison-glared at a Hillman until he pushed more strongly against his mates and made room for her slight form to ease by him.
He made a natural, but ill-judged, decision to run his hand over her body as she passed, and found himself wheezing on the hard oak boards. Her paramour, Count Zac, stepped on the fallen Hillman and vaulted over the bar.
The Hillman rose, his face a study in rage, to find Bad Tom’s snout within a hand’s breadth of his own. He flinched.
Tom handed the man-one of his own-a full flagon of ale. “Go drink it off,” he said.
The Keeper glared at the incursion of Albans now encroaching on the smooth delivery of ale. “Didn’t I rent you a private room?” he asked the captain.
“Do you want to hear this tale, or not?” the captain said.
The Keeper grunted.
“So Thorn-” Every man and woman in earshot was aware that the captain or the duke-or whatever tomfool title he went by these days-had just said Thorn’s name three times.
Three hundred Albin leagues north and west, Thorn stood in a late-winter snow shower. He stood on the easternmost point of the island he had made his own, his place of power, and great breakers of the salt-less inner sea slammed against the rock of the island’s coast and rose ten times the height of a man into the air, driven by the strong east wind.
Out in the bay, the ice was breaking.
Thorn had come to this exposed place to prepare a working-a set of workings, a nest of workings-against his target: Ghause, wife of the Earl of Westwall. He felt his name-like the whisper of a moth’s wings in the air close to a man’s face on a hot summer night. But many said his name aloud, in whispers, often enough that he didn’t always pay heed. But in this case, the naming was accompanied by a burst of power that even across the circle of the world made itself felt in the aethereal.
The second calling was softer. But such things run in threes, and no user of the art could ever be so ignorant as to attract his attention and leave the third naming incomplete.
The third use was casual-contemptuous. Thorn’s sticklike, bony hands flinched.
But the Dark Sun was no casual enemy, and he stood in a place of power surrounded by friends. And he had made Thorn blind, as he did on a regular basis. Carefully, with the forced calm that, in a mere man, would have involved the gritting of teeth, Thorn mended the small gap in the aether made by the calling of his name, and went back to crafting his working.
But his patience had been interrupted and his rage-Thorn thought dimly around the black hole in his memory that once he had been against rage-flowed out. Some of the rage he funnelled into his working against Ghause-what better revenge? But still he felt that the Dark Sun made him small, and he hated.
And so, without further thought, he acted. A raid was redirected. A sentry was killed. A warden-a daemon lord, as men would call him-was suborned, his sense of reality undermined and conquered.
Try that, mortal man, Thorn thought, and went back to his casting.
In doing so, like a bird disturbed in making a spring nest, he dropped a twig. But consumed by rage and hate, he didn’t notice.
“Attacked Lissen Carak, and we beat him. He made a dozen mistakes to every one we made-eh, Tom?” Gabriel smiled.
The giant Hillman shrugged. “Never heard you admit we made any mistakes at all.”
Ser Gavin chose to lean against the bar on the other side. “Imagine how Jehan would tell this tale if he was here,” he said.
“Then it would be nothing but my mistakes,” Gabriel said, but with every other man and woman in red, he raised his cup and drank.
“Any road, we beat him,” Tom said. “But it wasn’t no Chaluns, was it? Nor a Battle of Chevin.” Both battles-a thousand years and more apart-had been glorious and costly victories of the forces of men over the Wild.
Gabriel shrugged. “No-it was more like a skirmish. We won a fight in the woods, and then another around the fortress. But we didn’t kill enough boglins to change anything.” He shrugged. “We didn’t kill Plangere or change his mind.” He looked around. “Still-we’re not dead. Round one to us. Eh?”
Bad Tom raised his mug and drank.
“In summer we rode east to the Empire. To Morea.”
“That’s more like it,” said the Keeper.
“It’s a tangled thread. The Emperor wanted to hire us, but we never knew what for, because by the time we heard, he’d been taken captive and his daughter Irene was on the throne. And Duke Andronicus was trying to take the city.”
“By which our duke means Liviapolis,” Wilful Murder said to his awestruck new apprentice archer, Diccon, a boy so thin and yet so muscular that most of the women in the common room had noticed him. “Biggest fewkin’ city in the world.” Wilful knew what it meant when all the officers gathered, and he’d wormed his way patiently into the story circle.
The Keeper raised an eyebrow. His daughter laughed. “Way I hear it, she had ’im taken so she could have the power.”
“Nah, that’s just rumour,” her father said.
The Red Knight’s companions didn’t say a thing. They didn’t even exchange looks.
“We arrived,” the captain said with relish, “in the very nick of time. We routed the usurper-”
Tom snorted. Michael looked away, and Sauce made a rude gesture. “We almost got our arses handed to us,” she said.
The captain raised an eyebrow. “And after a brief winter campaign-”
“Jesu!” spat Sauce. “You’re leaving out the whole story!”
“By Tar’s tits!” Bad Tom said.
Just for a moment, at his oath, a tiny flawed silence fell so that his words seemed to carry.
“What did you just say?” Gabriel asked, and his brother Gavin looked as if one of Tom’s big fists had struck him.
Bad Tom frowned. “It’s a Hillman’s oath,” he said.
Gabriel was staring at him. “Really?” he asked. He sighed. “At any rate, after a brief but very successful winter campaign, we destroyed the duke’s baggage and left his army helpless in the snow and then made forced marches-”