Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

When the bars were high enough he stepped forward, ducking to pass under the lowest spikes, and waited again, staring out into the cold mist of the night. No torches yet, nothing at all to be seen, only the sound of horses again, faintly, through the low, drifting fog. Then another noise behind him as the portcullis slotted with a clang into its niche at the top of the gate and the guards began quickly winding down the drawbridge over the dry moat.

When the bridge was down, Garsenc Castle lay open to those waiting in the fog, and the first part of what Thaune had come home to do was accomplished. The easy part.

He stepped out onto the wooden bridge and felt more than he heard the simultaneous tread of someone approaching from the other end. He still could not see. The mist redoubled his anxiety, inducing primitive, irrational feelings of dread. He couldn't even make out the planks of the bridge beneath his boots. He stopped walking. "Light your torch," he said, his tone as calm as he could make it. The sound of his voice went out feebly into the enveloping darkness and was swallowed up.

There was silence as the approaching footsteps also came to a halt. Thaune felt as if he were wrapped in a grey shroud, ready for burial. He shuddered at the thought.

"Light your torch," he said again to the silent figures on the bridge with him.

Finally he heard the scraping sound of flint being struck, and a moment later the resinous scent of a torch catching came to him. In the fog the light spun out only a little way, a small circle, a tenuous island of illumination on the bridge.

Bright enough to reveal Galbert de Garsenc, the High Elder of Gorhaut, huge and unmistakable, standing directly in front of him with two corans on either hand.

"I am most happy to oblige you," said the High Elder in his unforgettable voice. "To illuminate the first of the traitors we will now be pleased to burn. I will light your own pyre with the torch you requested."

Thaune felt as if the world had dropped away beneath his feet, as if the final darkness at the end of time had come.

His breath was snatched away in horror. He couldn't move. He was actually afraid he was going to fall down.

"Do not even think about fleeing," Galbert added, the deep tones conveying infinite contempt. "There are four archers behind me with their bows trained on you, and this light is more than good enough for them."

Another tread resounded on the far side of the bridge, approaching from behind the Elder, just beyond the spill of light. "It would be good enough, I agree," said a lighter, cooler voice. "If they were still conscious and therefore still holding their bows. It is all right, Thaune," said Blaise de Garsenc, "we have this under control."

There came another sound, twice in quick succession, and the corans beside Galbert grunted and slid to the planks, their swords rattling on the wood. The torch was dropped but then seized by an invisible hand before it could go out.

"Do tell me, father," said Blaise, coming forward into the light, "what is it that makes you so anxious to burn people alive?" His words were flippant but Thaune could hear the stiff tension running beneath them. He wondered when father and son had last seen each other. Galbert said nothing at all; the rage in his eyes was genuinely frightening in the torchlight.

"Blaise," came a Portezzan accent from the murk beyond, "it seems your brother is here too."

"How splendid! A reunion!" said Blaise, again with that forced gaiety. "Bring him, Rudel, let me see those dear, kind features again."

Galbert still had not spoken. Thaune was unable to look at the High Elder's face. He heard footsteps again, and two men brought forward a third between them.

"We have dealt with all the others," said a voice Thaune remembered from Arbonne, "About fifteen of them, as you guessed." They were lighting more torches now; by their light Thaune recognized Bertran de Talair.

"Nicely done, Thaune," Blaise said, not taking his eyes from his father and the handsome figure of Ranald de Garsenc beside him. "We had to make the assumption that there would be an informer though, that you would need to trust too many people for them all to be reliable. We were here two days earlier than I told you, and I had men watching the roads east to see who might be coming. I thought my father might want to do the honours himself. After all," he added, with sudden, corrosive irony, "it has been months since he had anyone burned, and that hardly counts because he wasn't able to be at Aubry himself. Tell me, dear brother, did you enjoy it there? Was it a fine hunt? Did the women scream amusingly?" Ranald de Garsenc shifted his feet but made no reply.

Men were walking up now, passing Thaune on either side, entering the castle. The big Arbonnais coran named Valery stopped beside him. "Well done," he said quietly. "Now tell me the numbers inside. Do we have a fight on our hands?"

"How many of you are there?"

"Only fifty. Trained mercenaries, though, from Portezza and Gotzland. This isn't an invasion of Gorhaut from Arbonne. This is a rising from within. We hope."

Thaune cleared his throat. "I think about half the castle will be with us." He reached for his belt and unhooked a large key ring. "This unlocks the weapons room—to the right across the courtyard, the double doors with the arch. Girart, who is just behind me, will show you. You may trust him with anything. There might be a hundred, perhaps more, who resist, but they will not be well armed." He cleared his throat again. "I think if En Blaise lets them know he is here there may be fewer who fight."

Blaise heard that. "Let them know?" he echoed in mock indignation. "Of course I'll let them know. I'm the wayward son come home to his father's open arms. There ought to be music, a feast, wine and burning women for my delight. Perhaps that is why you came, father? To surprise me with the warmth of your welcome?" His tone was brittle, febrile. Beside Thaune, Valery of Talair made a small sound but said nothing.

Thaune became aware that the High Elder had now begun murmuring softly, but not to any of them. Somehow the quality of the man's voice, his inward, intense manner, shaped a silence on the bridge in the mist, and gradually, with a growing horror that bit deeper than the cold, Thaune became aware that the High Elder was intoning the denunciation of the god.

"… to the infinite cold that was before the world was or the moons were spoken, before the sun was moved and the stars allowed their light. O, most holy Corannos of ice and all the sacred tongues of fire, unworthy as I surely am in your sight, I beseech thee, in the name of your own ancient gifts to us, that there shall be for this man torments without number to the ending of time. Maggots beneath the skin and worms in his heart, the rotting sickness and the black blood that cannot be stanched. I pray that you send down upon this man who is my son no longer—"

"That is enough." A second voice, cold with distaste. Bertran de Talair. Blaise himself was silent, immobile in the face of what his rather was doing.

"— foul madness and a twisting agony in his bowels, blindness, boils, the stinking corruption of his flesh—"

" I said that is enough! "

"— all of these and more, I most holy Corannos. I pray that he be stricken also with the pestilence that—"

Bertran came around in front of Galbert and, in the midst of this pronunciation of the blackest curse known to the Elders of Corannos, struck him full in the face with an open palm, the way one might slap a servant. Galbert stopped, out of genuine shock as much as anything else. Blaise still hadn't moved. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it wordlessly. Ranald de Garsenc looked pale and unsteady beside his father.