S. Stirling - The High King of Montival

“I know what you mean! Near two years we’ve been after the Sword, from sunset to sunrise, from Montival to Nantucket. . and now we’ve got it, the creature. What next?”

“Home,” she said, and there was longing in the word, a feeling he could taste in his own mouth.

“Home. Though that walk is likely to be upstairs , as it were.”

Then she went on: “You said to walk towards the Sword was to walk towards your own death. Now we’ve got it-and you’re still alive, by Father, Son and Holy Ghost!”

“And I’m still walking towards death,” he said. At her scowl: “Though to be sure, we all are! At the rate of a day for every day, so to speak.”

Then she sighed, and he nodded. It was cold, if bleakly beautiful, and the damp chill penetrated their grimy wools and leathers and padding. More, there was work to be done. They turned and walked hand in hand back towards the spot where the. . town. . had been.

The Nantucket where the Change had begun a generation before was gone. So was the Bou el-Mogdad , the captured Moorish corsair vessel they’d run ashore as it burned beneath them, and the wharf it had struck with multiton violence. Slightly charred, the long, slender shape of her sister-ship lay canted on the shore. Even awkwardly stranded on the sandy mud by the retreating tide, the pirate schooner Gisandu still had the graceful menace of her namesake-the word meant Shark in the Wolof tongue. Beaching her hadn’t done any harm; ships of that breed were built for longshore work.

Three groups stood there under the shadow of its bowsprit, edging apart. Rudi’s friends and kin and the followers picked up along the way, thirty altogether, stood around a crackling driftwood fire that spat sparks blue and green. The surviving dark-faced corsairs from the two Saloum rovers were a bit farther away with their heels to the waves that hissed up the sand, forty of them. . and not quite enemies anymore. And the High Seeker of the Church Universal and Triumphant was farther away still, with the ten men left to him glaring helplessly at both the other groups.

Only Rudi’s own folk were armed; they’d awoken to find the others still groggy and helpless. The Cutters and corsairs were looking uneasily at the cold steel glint of sword blades and spearheads and the points of nocked arrows. Father Ignatius of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict nodded to Rudi, a short, brisk gesture. His hands rested on the pommel of his own sheathed longsword; his tilted dark eyes were calm, and his armor showed through the battle rents in his kirted-up black robe. Their injuries had healed, but not the damage to their gear.

“We had best settle matters here soon, Your Majesty. Our food supplies are very low. The Gisandu ’s stores were exhausted bringing both her crew and the Cutters here. Also we do not have so much of an advantage over them that we can long delay,” he said.

There was a limit to the number of men you could hold at the point of a blade, and it wasn’t very high if they were brave and knew their business. Which described everyone here quite well.

“That’s the truth. It’s past time to. . settle. . these Cutter fellows, Chief,” Edain Aylward Mackenzie said grimly. “Settle them in the Mother’s earth, and send the souls of them off to the Summerlands for a talking-to from Herself.”

Edain was a few years younger than his chieftain, but he was no longer the carefree youth who’d crossed the Cascades.

He came because I asked him; because I was his friend, and his chief. . I’ d feel guiltier about that if things were any better back home.

They weren’t; from the little they’d heard, the war against the Cutters and their allies wasn’t going well at all.

“It’s tired and weary and plain buggering annoyed with them I am, and that’s a fact,” Edain went on.

The cold wind tousled the other clansman’s mop of oak-brown curls. Usually his gray eyes were calm and friendly, but now they were as bleak as the ocean waves. The long yellow stave of his yew longbow twitched slightly in his grip. The Mackenzies were a people of the bow, and even in that company his friend was Aylward the Archer, as his father had been before him.

Rudi nodded thoughtfully; the Sword of the Prophet and the magi in the bloodred robes had been on their heels all the way from Montival-though nobody had known that was the land’s name when they left. They’d killed and injured friends and kinfolk and sworn men of his, and if the questers weren’t all dead it wasn’t for want of the men out of Corwin trying. Their Prophet himself had set them on his trail, and they’d followed it with bulldog tenacity.

“Hain dago,” his half sister Mary said-they shared a father. “Kill them.”

She touched her eye patch and scowled at them with the one cornflower-blue orb left her; the other had been cut out of her head by another red-robed magus of the Corwinite cult back in the mountains of what had once been Montana. Her twin Ritva Havel nodded vigorously and spoke as her thick yellow fighting-braid bobbed on her shoulder.

“Aunt Astrid has a standard order for situations like this,” she said.

She fell into Sindarin again for a moment, the pretty-sounding liquid trills of the language the Dunedain Rangers used among themselves-for secrecy, because few others knew it, and because their founders were devoted to a set of tales of the ancient world they called the Histories.

Then she translated: “Behead them every one, and that instantly.”

Rudi’s mouth quirked. That was actually from a different set of writings. But Astrid Havel, the Hiril Dunedain -the Lady of the Rangers-did have a rather straightforward approach to such matters.

When he replied, it was in the tone you used to quote from a holy book: “Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

He spoke with malice aforethought from the actual Histories; the Rangers weren’t the only ones who liked to read old tales by the fireside in the Black Months. His own mother had told that one aloud in Dun Juniper’s hall many times when he was a child. It was a grand story of battle and adventure, and it had songs she’d rendered in her fine bard’s voice.

The twins gave an identical wince; they’d been too similar even for close kin to tell them apart, before Mary lost the eye. Rangers took their Histories seriously . You could do worse as a guide to life, though he didn’t really think they were as close to fact as most of the Dunedain imagined. Still, who could tell? The world before the Change had been very strange by all accounts, and it was difficult to tell fancy from truth in those tales. Dragons and Rings of Power were no odder than flying ships and weapons that burned whole cities.

Or stranger than some things I’ve met myself , he reminded himself, his hand on the moonstone pommel.

“I don’t think any of them is Gollum material,” Ritva said, a trace of sulkiness in her tone.

“Though I wouldn’t put it past them to bite off a finger if they got within snapping range,” Mary added.

Her husband, Ingolf, nodded. “Me neither, Rudi,” he said in his flat Wisconsin rasp. “Kill ’em and be damned to them.”

He was a big man, as tall as Rudi and a little broader, with a battered face beneath his cropped brown beard that showed all thirty of his years. Normally it was good-natured, despite hard times spent as a hired soldier and salvager, but now it clenched like a fist. He’d been a prisoner of the Church Universal and Triumphant in Corwin itself. The wounds on his body had healed, though the marks were there. The ones in his mind and soul had taken longer to knit, and scars remained there too, visible sometimes in his dark blue eyes.