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Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

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Paul Kearney The Mark of Ran

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“My name is Cortishane,” Rol said, somewhat alarmed to find that he was talking to a babbling lunatic. He backed away, weighing the pitch pot in his fist and calculating the distance to the man’s head. The dirk in his bootleg seemed suddenly too far from his fingers.

The stranger grinned, a gesture that transformed his countenance into something bright and feral.

“Old Ardisan has been discreet,” he said in a low voice that the storm should have rendered inaudible. “Perhaps too much so. Listen here. There is a dead city in the delta of the Vosk. It was named after you, and you will go there one day. When you do, I shall be waiting.” He raised his head to stare at the black cloud that towered over the headland. “There is a storm coming by land as well as sea, and you will be in the eye of it. This cockleshell of yours had best be a weatherly craft.”

“I have to go now,” Rol said uneasily. “They’ll be missing me up at the house.”

The stranger nodded, and his manner brightened, became mocking. “One thing more, my lad. This idyll of Ardisan’s is at an end. Fate has come knocking at the door. I have a gift for you now that may ease your passage in the world. Hold out your hand.”

Rol immediately closed his free fingers into a fist and backed away. “Stay back, or you’ll have a face full of pitch.”

“I doubt it. The stuff in that pot is cold as a witch’s cunny.”

And somehow the man had darted forward, quick as a heron’s lunge, and had grasped Rol’s free hand in his own. His fingers were like cold iron, and they burned. Rol cried out and fell to his knees in the shingle. The stranger bent over him and forced open the fist, matched palm for palm. It felt as though the flesh of Rol’s hand were being seared through the very bone to the marrow. He screamed, but the sound was lost in the omnivorous roar of the wind. When he was released he fell backwards and a foaming wave crashed over him, the salt water pouring into his eyes, his ears and mouth. He rolled onto his side, staggered to his feet, and the next wave smashed into the backs of his thighs, toppling him once more. The man was gone, but Rol was sure he saw something sleek and black and shining leap into the rabid waves and disappear, before the salt spray blinded him once more.

He was floundering in waist-deep water-somehow he had rolled down the beach into the riotous breakers. He fought himself upright, his whole world a black and white storm of fuming water. The waves seemed to be trying to drag him out to sea, and there was cold laughter in their thunder. Finally he found himself by Gannet again, and he wrapped an arm about the wood of her sternpost. Staring at his pain-racked hand he thought he could make out a shape, a scallop of scar on the palm, but the light was going fast and his eyes were stinging with salt. He stumbled inland, up the face of the little cove, and did not stop until he had grass under his feet again and the bellow of the sea was muffled by the frowning cliffs below.


Lightning played about the headland, and there was a bright red glow that perplexed Rol. Then he heard shouting over the wind and the pelting rain, and broke into a run toward Eyrie.

A mob of men with torches were milling there, perhaps a hundred on foot and another score on horseback, their cuirasses shining in the stormlit rain. They had surrounded the shuttered house and various of them were hammering at the closed door. Rol saw Serioc the Headman of Driol there, carrying a half pike and hitching at the weight of an ancient mail shirt on his back. He looked both self-important and embarrassed, like a man caught out giving charity. But the obvious leader of the crowd was a fully armored figure on a black destrier, his face almost invisible beneath the bedraggled plumes of his helm, which he kept twitching aside in irritation. Now and again he would lean in the saddle and speak to one of the other horsemen who clustered deferentially about him, and they would nod solemnly.

Rol wondered if he had slipped into some fevered, dream-lit madness. Clutching his injured hand to his breast, he dropped into the sodden heather a cable from the house, and watched as the pigs were run off squealing, Ayd’s vegetable garden was trampled, and Eyrie’s stout shutters were dunted and thumped by the butts of pikes and halberds. The more enterprising of the mob scrambled up onto the roof of the cottage and began thrusting pike-points down through the turves of the roof. However, they all scrambled hastily to the ground again when one of the penetrating pike-shafts was whipped out of its owner’s grasp and disappeared, only to re-emerge point first and with startling rapidity close to his backside.

“Come out now and we will be lenient, Cortishane,” the plumed horseman shouted, and the ill-tempered growl of the crowd went quiet. “It is the law. You are suspected of brewing witchery and must answer for it before the Marschal. By resisting arrest you will only make it worse.”

A silence, except for the billowing whine of the wind and the rattle of rain off armor. Out to sea thunder rumbled, like the bad-tempered muttering of some subterranean god. Then the entire throng of men jumped as the bars of Eyrie’s only door were drawn back within, and Rol’s grandfather stepped out into the rain. At once a score of crossbowmen put their foot in the stirrups of their weapons and pulled back the bowcords to set their quarrels.

“Lord Vasst. To think you should be out on such a night over such a trifling misunderstanding.” Rol’s grandfather smiled reasonably. Behind him, lamp- and firelight streamed out, to make of his bent frame a wizened silhouette. He leaned heavily on a blackthorn stick and in his free hand was nothing more threatening than an unlit pipe.

Nonetheless, the mass of men backed away from him, murmuring.

“Gossip and rumor make a fool’s justice, my lord. I have been here twenty years, and never yet harmed a soul, nor will I, if left in peace.”

“That ape-armed giant of yours scared my boy half to death,” a voice shouted fiercely from back in the crowd. “And do you think we don’t see the woman prowling the moors at night with those eyes of hers?”

An angry snarl of agreement eddied through the ranks of armed men. Lord Vasst held up a gauntleted hand.

“If you are innocent, Cortishane, then you and your family have nothing to fear from Dennifreian justice. But we are here to take you by force, if need be. Do not compel us to shed blood.”

The mob made way for a file of the liveried crossbowmen, their weapons now cocked and ready. Lying where he was, Rol could no longer make out the expression on his grandfather’s face, but he was sure beyond all doubt that for a moment the old man looked straight at him as he lay shivering in the heather, the lines about his eyes tightening.

Then Grandfather straightened, and leaned on his stick no more. When he spoke again, it was with a strong, carrying voice that seemed that of a much younger man.

“You are a gaggle of ignorant barbarians. I have encountered what you term justice on half the continents of the world; always it ends with a rope or a pitch-soaked stake. Leave this place now, or by Ran’s blood, I shall lay you dead.”

With that, he raised his arms skyward as if to try and grasp the lightning. Behind him, the gleam from within the cottage was blotted out by the huge bulk of Morin, and in Morin’s head two hungry green lights burned that had nothing human about them.

“Shoot him!” Lord Vasst screamed, his horse bucking under him. “He’ll spell us all!”

Rol found it hard to follow what happened next. There was a flash of emerald light, so brief it might have been tinted lightning. He distinctly heard the thock of the crossbows releasing. Men screamed and shouted and streamed away from Eyrie, knocking one another down. The horses shrieked and reared. Above them all, Morin reared up tall as a tree, his face transformed into the mask of a ravening beast-and behind him another, smaller shape sped out of the cottage with the same inhuman light in its eyes. It was prick-eared and feline with a twitching tail, but ran on two legs and yowled insanely before launching itself on Lord Vasst’s men.

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