Dave Duncan - When the Saints

“He’ll never get them through this muck,” Vlad growled. “Who owns them?”

The question was translated and answered, the answer translated: “He thinks Duke Wartislaw does, sir. He says they’re not his.”

“He’s even more of a fool than he looks. If he’d said they were his I might have let him keep them. Tell him we’re taking him and all that steak back to Gallant.” Vlad glanced around. “We can’t do more here than get ourselves killed. Let’s-” He jumped, rattling his armor, as he discovered Wulf at his elbow. “Where in flames did you come from?”

“Came to see what was keeping you,” Wulf said cheerily. “What’s up?”

“Much what we thought. Back home, everyone. No fight tonight. Go and make your wives happy. And tell Sir Teodor to turn his troop around.” He waved for his men to leave without him. “Come and look at this.” He led Wulf in the opposite direction. “See the trees?”

“Er… no.” Against the last traces of daylight in the western sky, there were no trees. The steep hillsides had been stripped bare. The trees were down here, in the gorge. In pieces. Wulf had only a rough grasp of the lay of the land, but he was sure the wagon he had fired had been at the far end of the gorge, two or three miles from here. The blast couldn’t have stripped hills that far away, surely?

But he couldn’t ask Vlad, because the big man was plowing through the branches and debris, evidently returning to some particular place. He was big and clad in steel, heaving debris out of his way like some great impatient bear. Even following in his tracks, Wulf could not go as fast. When Vlad stopped, he had to wait for him to catch up. “Can you hear the waterfall?”

Wulf listened. He heard a million syncopated dripping noises, nothing more… Possibly voices a long way off. “No.”

“Thunder Falls. Should be right here, Jachym says, and the others agree. The river’s not running.”

“That’s ridiculous! What can stop a river running?”

“You can. Look down here.” What he had brought Wulf to see was under deadfall, almost invisible in the gloom.

Wulf squatted down, then stood up hastily. “Bodies!”

“About three of them, we thought. That’s if you put them back together, they’d make three or a bit more. A horse and a half on top of them, roughly, and then trees on top of that.”

“No!” Wulf said, appalled. “The explosion couldn’t have done this! The powder wagons were miles away.” This was destruction on a scale he could barely imagine. Men torn to pieces?

“The explosion rattled Castle Gallant!” Vlad said with a chuckle. c0em201C; But you’re right. The gunpowder went up very close to their camp, the man says. Lech is his name, Polish. The blast did terrible slaughter, he thinks, but all he truly knows is what happened here. One or two men have gotten across, but there’s still about a thousand men bivouacking on this side tonight, so let’s you and me just creep quietly away and not provoke any nasty reprisals.”

He started to move. Wulf grabbed his steel-plated arm. “This side of what?”

Vlad chuckled. “Of the avalanche. The blast you set off shook the mountains and started an avalanche. The valley’s totally blocked with snow above the falls. A couple of hundred feet high, Lech said, but we caught a glimpse of it and I think he may be short a bit. Who knows? Avalanches start terrible winds, laddie, and this one came crashing down into the gorge. Its wind smashed everything on this side and probably on the other side, too. The debris has dammed the Ruzena.”

It had surely damned Wulfgang Magnus. “Then the lake will rise? And…”

“Not much, we decided. It’s a big lake, the men tell me. But the low point is where the river drains out, so the area just beyond the snow pile is going to fill up. The gorge will become a smaller lake, until the snow melts next summer. If the Dragon isn’t under the snow, or gone over the cliff, it’s going to be underwater, and when the dam breaks it may even get swept away. Don’t make no difference now.”

“We won?” Wulf said, unable to comprehend the scale of this disaster.

Vlad gave him a buffet on the shoulder that almost knocked him over. Luckily the giant was wearing leather gloves, not gauntlets.

“ It was you who won, sonny! Duke Wartislaw is either dead or beaten. Wulfgang Magnus, you are the greatest of us all. I couldn’t believe you were going to do what you said you would do with that bed warmer. You’ve got more stomach than a herd of cows. Maybe you were just ignorant and lucky, but that’s true of lots of heroes. You single-handedly stopped thirty thousand men and lifted the siege of Castle Gallant. I’m so proud of you I want to scream your fame to the skies, and I know I mustn’t do that. I tell you, Father would have wept with pride.”

Just a few days ago, Wulf would have burst his heart to earn such words from Vlad. Now they made him feel ill. He was doing the devil’s work.

How many Speakers eavesdropped on that exchange could never be known. As Justina had said, Speakers could not spend all day and night Looking, no matter how interesting the subject, and they were limited to exploiting the points of view of people they knew. Very few had ever met Wulfgang, and although Vlad’s reputation as a warrior had spread all over Christendom, Speakers had little interest in soldiers. Duke Wartislaw undoubtedly had some Speakers with his army, and one or more might have survived the disaster. Cardinal Zdenek’s hirelings were certtanceion as a wainly watching events, and the Church’s huge workforce of Speakers would be keeping watch on Wulf, amassing evidence of his Satanism for future action. Justina was well known among the Saints, and news that the old bird had taken on another hire would have aroused their curiosity. However the news got out, it spread across the continent faster than fire in a powder wagon.

Justina herself was drunk, drunker than she had been in thirty years, still slumped on the bench outside her cottage, trying to get up enough energy to put herself to bed. What a disaster! Those astonishing Magnus brothers, her great-nephews. Ottokar and Anton were still shivering on the roof of the north barbican. Vladislav was apparently interrogating a prisoner in a collapsed forest… and Wulfgang was there with him! Twenty minutes ago the kid had been chalky white and ready to fall over, but he must have found some more energy from somewhere. Ah, youth!

But then her curiosity was aroused by the devastation. In a life of nigh on a hundred years, she had never seen anything quite like that. She watched as the two brothers went off to inspect something. In a few moments she sobered herself with a flash of talent and sat up straight. She heard every word of Vlad’s lecture.

God be praised!

She hurried indoors and changed into a finer cloak and bonnet. She opened a gate through limbo, emerging on a small balcony that seemed to be suspended directly below the stars. Blind until her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she fumbled her way to the solitary high-backed oak chair. She stretched out a hand to find the bell rope and tug it to announce her arrival.

Despite what she had told Wulfgang, Elysium was a real place, the former monastery of St. Pantaleimon, at Meteora, in Thessaly. Although this was not generally known, the original monks had been wiped out by pestilence more than a hundred years earlier, and the Saints had moved in. Like many other religious houses in the area, St. Pantaleimon’s was perched on a sheer rock pillar hundreds of feet high, completely inaccessible to workadays. Food and other supplies had to be hauled up on ropes. Speakers, of course, could enter and leave by way of limbo, bringing most of their food with them.