Dave Duncan - When the Saints

So now what? “Build on success,” Father had always said. Otto said so too.

“We’d better assume the Dragon exists until we are sure it doesn’t,” Wulf decided. “When I’ve finished this excellent meal, it might be time for me to go and look for it.”

He had not seen her truly startled before. “Gramercy! Now? In daylight?”

“Better in daylight while everyone’s busy than at night when it’s quiet and they have guards posted and I can walk into trees.”

She chuckled uneasily. “Sooth, you’re the soldier, young squire, not me. You’ll just look, though? Don’t meddle. They’ll have Speakers, and a halo shows up as bright by day as in the gloam.”

Somehow the thought of what he was planning had dispatched the rest of his appetite. Abandoning the idea of a third helping, he moved the bowl away from him. Without touching it.

“I can lift that,” he said. “Could I lift the bombard? Roll it over the cliff?”

“No. You’d outblaze the sun, and very likely damage yourself, but nothing else would happen. And you shouldn’t be talking about it, if you think that Alojz Zauber is in league with the Wends.”

Hellfire! “I forgot that. Well, I’ll need to wear something…” He shivered as he realized where he would have to look for suitable clothes. “I’ll come back here to change, if that’s all right?”

This time he wasn’t going to ask Anton’s permission. Anton was in the solar with Vlad and Otto. Radim, the secretary, and old seneschal Jurbarkas had been allowed to sit in the other two chairs. Dali Notivova was standing by the window. They were all listening to Vlad, who was spouting a seemingly endless list of things that had to be done, with occasional prompts from Otto. Radim was frantically writing notes. So the military end of things was being attended to.

“I’ll help you.” Sybilla slunk in seductively from nowhere.

“What do you want?” Wulf demanded.

“Well, I’ll help you change if you want k if›

“Can you ride?”

She tossed her head. “Of course. I’m a Speaker. You think a dumb brute could throw me off?”

“She rides,” Justina said, frowning.

“Then come and be welcome,” Wulf said. He didn’t care what happened to the little flibbertigibbet. Only Madlenka mattered.

She was leaning over a blood-soaked table, steadying a wounded man, her hands caked in dried blood. The patient was little more than a boy, but he had taken a longbow arrow in the upper part of his chest. Descending steeply, it had probably lodged against his shoulder blade, for otherwise it would either have gone right through him or she would have tried to push it through. The burly young surgeon had cut off the excess arrow and was inserting a set of tongs, like two pointed spoons on a pivot, hoping to grip the arrowhead and crush the barbs so he could pull it out. The patient, thanks be to God, was unconscious. If his lung had been damaged or was about to be, he would probably never wake up.

Wulf could go there and heal him with a touch. But the first commandment would not allow that, nor let him heal any of the many other injured likely to die within the week. There must be quite enough whispers already about the mysterious squire who had cured Anton, who came and went so inexplicably.

He had never imagined Madlenka calmly assisting in such butchery. Her courage must be as solid as the castle walls. Although he loved her to distraction, he really did not know her very well. In fact, he did not know women very well.

Sybilla was still smirking.

He told her, “I’ll come back here. If you want to come to Long Valley with me, you’d better make yourself less conspicuous.”

And then he opened a gate into limbo.

He went back to the little bartizan, trusting that it would be unoccupied, and that from there he would have a clear view of the northern approach. The first thing he saw was Madlenka’s footprints. The thin snow on the floor had been trampled and had mostly melted, but only her prints showed on the steps outside. He gazed at them sadly. Anton’s wife!

But there was a war to fight. Who knew what prize the winner might claim?

He had come to the bartizan to view the Silver Road north of the castle. At the far end, where it turned the corner into the gorge, the Wends had put up blindings to hide what they were doing, but it wasn’t hard to guess that they were excavating a gun emplacement for the bombard, a nest for the Dragon.

A party of eight or ten horsemen was heading down to the castle, with a herald in front-obviously a flag of truce seeking leave to recover their dead, plus their wounded, if any had not been killed by the victorious defenders. Wulf could see scores of bodies all over the road, and even then his view of the area directly in front of the gate was blocked by the corner of the barbican. That was where the building stones had been dropped, so corpses would be lying in heaps there. The attackers had been sent in across a well-designed killing ground, and even the undermanned garrison had managed to put it to good use.

The truce would be granted, of course, because otherwise the Cardicians would have to dispose of the carrion themselves. The Wends’ main task would be to identify the nobly born among their fallen, which would not be easy after the Castle Gallant scavengers had stripped the corpses. The missing nobles would be tallied by now, and close aides sent along to identify them. A few more bodies might be selected on the basis of calluses on the inside of the knee from riding, better nourishment, old wounds, and so on. Those might be taken back to the Pomeranian camp in the hope that some friend or relative would recognize and name them. The commoners would be tossed over the edge while a priest chanted a prayer and sprinkled holy water. Ravens or the Ruzena River could do the rest. Naked we enter the world, and equal we shall stand before the Throne at the last day.

It was the charnel ground at the bottom of the cliff that interested Wulf. The rocky shelf on which Gallant stood jutted out from the side of the Hogback at a sharp angle, and the corner was cut off by the bend of the Ruzena. In places the softer rock below the shelf had even been undercut, but that corner sheltered a triangle of dead ground, like an armpit, a rocky slope sheltered from the wind and inaccessible to firewood hunters, so that vegetation had survived.

The ladders had snapped when they fell, with the top parts taking their burdens over the cliff. The ghouls would not have had time, and probably not much inclination, to scavenge down there. Wulf chose a large, fairly flat boulder close to the water and opened a gate to it.

No one would see him appear out of nowhere, because branches shielded him from the castle above. Behind him the river swirled, fast and dark and deadly, speckled with flecks of rabid foam. Much of the rock must have fallen as waste when the road was carved out and the town site leveled, for it was a jagged nightmare, nothing like a river’s tidy shingle. From where he stood, he saw no bodies; hunting through that nightmare of shattered rock and thorns and spindly conifers was going to be a slow and dangerous process. Then he spotted a weathered skull grinning at him from among the rocks and realized that today’s Wends would not be the first dead to be abandoned here. It was an evil place, a backdoor to hell.

He used talent to move to another perch, and then another, heading up the slope. He found his first fresh body, a gruesome heap of steel and cloth and dried blood, with birds and insects already at work on it. Perhaps he had miscalculated, and all the corpses would be so mangled by their fall that none of them would serve his purpose.

For what felt like a dangerously long time he hunted without success. Bodies were hard to find among the jagged boulders, ev s bor wen after he had located the remains of the ladders, and those he did find were too damaged for his purpose. Their clothes were ripped and bloody, their armor bent out of shape. His time was short, for the Wends would not be as hesitant to investigate this area as the scavengers had been. The dead down here would have been the men near the tops of the ladders, and the odds were good that many of those would have been hotheaded esquires, the young Magnuses of Pomerania, all eager to find fame by being first to surmount the battlements of Castle Gallant. Here, not having been looted and stripped, they could be identified by their finery and their bodies retrieved for reward, or just out of loyalty.