“Magic often is. I am off to bed. I am an old woman who needs her rest.”
He took her hand. “No. Sit with me awhile, and we will go together.”
She actually felt herself blushing, and was glad of the dimness of the room. “Very well then. Let us sit here by the fire and pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“That there are no wars, no armies. Just the rain on the window, the wine in your glass.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
And they sat there hand in hand as the fire burnt low, as content with their common silence, it seemed, as some long-married couple at the end of a day’s labour.
I T has become a bizarre habit for an old man, Betanza thought, this night-time pacing of wintry cloisters. I am getting strange in my twilight years.
Charibon’s cathedral bells had tolled the middle of the night away, and the cloisters were deserted except for his black-robed shape walking up and down, the very picture of a troubled soul. He did this most nights of late, marching his doubts into the flagstones until he was weary enough to finally tumble into dreamless sleep. And then dragging himself awake in time for matins, with the sun still lost over the dark horizon.
The old need less sleep than the young anyway, he told himself. They are that much more familiar with the concept of their own mortality.
There had been a thaw, and now instead of snow it was a chill black rain that was pouring down out of the Cimbrics, flattening the swell on the Sea of Tor and rattling on the stone shingles of the monastery-city. It was moving slowly east, washing down the Torian plains and beating on the western foothills of the Thurians. In the morning it would be frowning over northern Torunna, where Corfe’s army was still a long day’s march away from their beds.
Betanza paused in his endless pacing. There was a solitary figure standing in the cloister ahead of him, looking beyond the pillars to the sodden lawn they enclosed and the black starless wedge of sky above it. A tall figure in a monk’s habit. Another eccentric, it seemed.
As he drew close the man turned, and Betanza made out a beak of a nose and high forehead under the cowl. A hint of bristling eye-brows.
“God be with you,” the man said.
“And with you,” the Vicar-General replied politely. He would have walked on, not wanting to interrupt the solitary cleric’s devotions, but the other spoke again, stalling him.
“Would you be Betanza, by any chance, head of the Inceptine Order?”
“I would.” Impossible to make out the colour of the monk’s habit in the darkness, but the material of it was rich and unadorned.
“Ah, I have heard of you, Father. At one time you were a duke of Astarac, I believe.”
His curiosity stirred, Betanza looked more closely at the other man. “Indeed. And you are?”
“My name is Aruan. I am a visitor from the west, come seeking counsell in these turbulent times.”
The man had the accent of Astarac, but there was an archaic strangeness to his diallect. He spoke, Betanza thought, like a character from some old history or romance. There were so many clerics from so many different parts of the world in Charibon at present, however. Only yesterday a delegation had arrived from Fimbria, of all places, with an escort of forty sable-clad pikemen.
“What part of Astarac do you hail from?” he asked.
“I was originally from Garmidalan, but I have not lived there for many years. Ah—listen, Betanza. Do you hear it?”
Betanza cocked his head, and over the hissing rain there came faint but clear a far-off melancholy howl. It was amplified by another, and then another.
“Wolves,” he said. “They scavenge right into the very streets of the city at this time of year.”
Aruan smiled oddly under his hood. “Yes, I’ll warrant they do.”
“Well, I must be getting on. I will leave you to your meditations, Aruan.” And Betanza continued his interrupted walk. Something about the stranger unsettled him, and he did not care to be addressed in such a familiar fashion. But he was not in the mood to make an issue of it. He buried his cold hands in his sleeves and paced out the flagstones around the cloister once more, the familiar dilemmas doing the rounds of his mind.
— And he stopped short. The man Aruan was in front of him once again.
Startled, he actually retreated a step from the dark figure. “How did you—?”
“Forgive me. I am very light on my feet, and you were lost in thought. If you could perhaps spare me some of your time, Betanza, there are things I would like to discuss with you.”
“See me in the morning. Now get out of my way,” Betanza blustered.
“That is a pity. Such a pity.” And something preternatural began to occur before Betanza’s astonished eyes. The black shape of Aruan bulked out and grew taller, the hem of his habit lifting off the ground. Two yellow lights blinked on like candles under his cowl, and there was the sound of heavy cloth tearing. Betanza made the Sign of the Saint and backed away, struck dumb by the transformation.
“You are a capable man,” a voice said, and it was no longer recognisable as wholly human. “It is such a shame. I like independent thinkers. But you do not have the abilities or the vulnerabilities I seek. Forgive me, Betanza.”
A werewolf towered there, the habit shrugged aside in rent fragments. Its ears spiked out like horns from the massive skull. Betanza turned to run but it caught him, lifting him into the air as though he were a child. Then it bit once, deep into the bone and cartilage of his neck, nameless things popping under its fangs. Betanza spasmed manically, then fell limp as a rag, his eyes bulging sightlessly. He was set down gently upon the blood-spattered flagstones of the cloister, a puddle of black robes with a white, agonised face staring out of them.
Beyond the monastery, the wolves howled sadly in the rain.
FIFTEEN
“A M I a fool? Do I look like a fool to you?” the Sultan of Ostrabar roared. “Do you expect me to believe that a host of fifteen thousand men constitutes a reconnaissance patrol? Beard of the beloved Prophet, I am surrounded by imbeciles! What is this? Some game of your own, Shahr Johor? Tell me how this could have happened, and explain why I was not informed!”
The lofty conference chamber within which Pieter Martellus had once planned the defence of Ormann Dyke was silent. The assembled Merduk officers kept their faces carefully blank. Shahr Indun Johor, commander-in-chief of the Merduk army, cleared his throat. A fine sheen of sweat varnished his handsome face.
“Majesty, I—”
“No elabourations or justifications. I want the truth!”
“I may have exceeded my orders, it is true. But I was told to conduct a reconnaissance in force of the Torrin Gap, and if practicable establish a garrison there to cut communications between Torunna and Almark.”
“You are parroting the very text of my written orders. Very good! Now explain to me how they were disobeyed.”
“Majesty, I did not disobey them—truly. But resistance was so minimal up there that I thought the time ripe to establish a firm foothold. That is… that is what the army of Khedive Arzamir was to accomplish. None of our patrols reported the presence of regular Torunnan troops. Not one! Still less those accursed red horsemen and their Fimbrian allies. So I–I exceeded my orders. I told Arzamir that if resistance did not stiffen he was to push on and try for Charibon. It was a mistake, I know.” Shahr Johor drew himself up as if awaiting a blow. “I take full responsibility. I gambled, and I lost. And we are ten thousand men the poorer for it. I have no excuses.”
The room was very still. It might have been populated by a crowd of armoured statues. On the riverbanks below they could hear a Merduk subadar haranguing his troops, and beyond that the regular clink of a thousand hammers as the last remnants of the Long Walls were demolished stone by stone.