Paul Finch - Dark North

Urgol stepped into view, and kicked the butchered tentacle into a recess to their left. “Mistress… your carriage awaits!”

Zalmyra hurried past, allowing him to shield her with his vast, hairy body. She dragged Rufio, though he could only stagger, one hand clasped to his wound.

Lucan used his last ounce of strength to lower Alaric. He tried to ignore the blows raining on his back, although steel now bit through his fur and mail. If he could just get Alaric to the courtyard without dropping him…

A hand gripped Lucan’s coif and yanked. He resisted, but then felt the rope slacken. The lad must have touched the ground, if sooner than Lucan had anticipated. He released the rope and swept around, swinging Heaven’s Messenger in a great, butchering arc. Limbs fell this way and that. Caradoc lost both arms from the elbows down, black juice jetting from his stumps. Gawaine had lost one arm, but still aimed a pick-axe with the other. Lucan deflected it and drove his steel at the facsimile’s face, only to see it parried.

He was exhausted.

The embrasure stood immediately to his rear. It would be a quicker death, surely, falling thirty feet onto flagstones, than being torn apart by these horrors? Though the outcome would be the same. Suicide meant certain damnation — as if his soul wasn’t already damned enough. Spurred by that thought, he struck at them again. An upward thrust eviscerated Gawaine; a swift backhand sheared through Bedivere’s neck, the head dropping backward on strands of tissue. More black filth exploded over Lucan, but still they pressed against him, now trying to take hold of him rather than inflict wounds. And then he heard a terrible wailing: “Alaric! Alaaaric!”

He managed to turn and peer down through the embrasure.

Alaric’s soft landing in the courtyard was explained.

The ragged, rain-soaked figure of Trelawna’s maid staggered, as though drunk, across the courtyard. But closer, at the foot of the battlements, was Trelawna herself. She was seated on the floor, holding Alaric in her arms, crying out his name, sobbing.

It was a brief, harrowing moment, though Lucan knew that he should not be surprised. No-one could have survived such a wound for long. And there was certainly no time to lament it — not when those responsible were still within sword’s length.

His strength revived by hatred, Lucan spun around and launched himself into the horde of abominations. His steel sang as it smote them, laying twitching, limbless forms on all sides. Those struggling to rise were sundered again. Those not yet stricken were impaled, or beheaded, or butchered where they stood.

“Come one, come all!” Lucan roared. “I summon all monsters to their doom!”

At first he thought they were falling back because his onslaught was too much for them, but then he realised they were not falling back, but clearing a passage through their mewling ranks — a passage along which, with slow, purposeful steps, a new figure was now approaching.

In all ways it was larger than Lucan — taller, stouter of limb, broader at chest and shoulder. Yet it wore the same dark mail and black livery, and the same cloak of black fur was draped down its back. Like Lucan, the newcomer had removed its helmet and pulled back its coif to shake out oil-black locks. It might at one time have been as wolfishly handsome as he was, though now those features had been obliterated by a mask of hideous scar tissue. Its eyes were tarnished sapphires, glinting through holes in parchment. The mouth was a lipless tear, the nose a scorched and flattened patch.

Lucan’s sword almost fell from his hand as the vision glided towards him.

A gleaming tentacle oozed behind it. Like all the rest, it was the construct of a demonic mind, and yet there was no mistaking it. Even after so many years of tumult, Lucan recollected every detail of the human dragon monster that had once been Duke Corneus, his father. With slow deliberation, the imitation drew its own version of Heaven’s Messenger from its back; this one still bore the unholy runes along its blade. Lucan failed to move, failed to respond in any way. He was mesmerised by the distorted form that had haunted so many of his worst nightmares.

“Still… a weakling… boy?” it rasped, in that voice of twisting, tortured wood. “Still… a milksop? No guts… no spine… couldn’t even… father a child…”

“Murderer,” Lucan whispered.

“Were going… to kill me… were you not?” The atrocious mouth laughed its terrible, heartless laugh — a laugh Lucan had heard down the decades, echoing from those many places where, without any writ from the King, Duke Corneus’s foes had been hanged, or garroted, or drawn apart by horses, or nailed to the doors of their own castles.

“Words… boy?” The imitation duke lofted the imitation sword to his massive shoulder. “Only… words? Well… if not battle… prepare for… slaughter. Unless… you beg. Like that weak-spirited… mother of yours. Begging… pleading…. each morn… before her penance…”

“Murderer!” Lucan shouted, raising his own sword.

With the speed of a viper, Duke Corneus lunged.

Rufio had lost so much blood that Urgol had to lift him into the black enamel coach, where Zalmyra laid a cloak over him. She closed and bolted the shutters, and sat facing her son through the dimness, while the woodwose climbed to the driving-bench. With a crack of his whip, the powerful team of horses surged out of the undercroft, trundling up the spiralling ramp, running down any figures that blundered into their path, severing tentacles with steel-rimmed wheels. At the top, the two foremost stallions reared, their hooves smashing the doors off their hinges.

The team crashed out into the courtyard. As they rattled towards the entry tunnel, Zalmyra opened her shutter just once to look out. Amid the carnage strewing the courtyard, she spotted the distinctive golden hair of Countess Trelawna, though it was now plastered across her shoulders and breasts as she sat cross-legged in the rain, cradling the form of a fallen knight. Another figure, the countess’s old nurse, crawled through the flood-waters.

“What’s happening?” Rufio gasped, too weak to open his own shutter.

“Nothing,” she said, closing out the light. But she seemed distracted. They rumbled into the entry tunnel; ahead, the drawbridge was already down. Abruptly, the duchess rapped on the ceiling. “Urgol! Stop!”

The vehicle slid to a halt, and shuddered as Urgol climbed from the bench. He opened the duchess’s door. “Mistress?”

“Go back,” she said. “Bring Countess Trelawna. She’s coming with us.”

Urgol nodded and clambered back to the roof to retrieve his iron-headed club.

Rufio looked up with an expression of almost absurd hopefulness.

“Don’t mistake me for a caring mother-in-law,” Zalmyra said. “I’ve no interest in your pretty little courtesan. It’s the brat she carries in her belly. Even if we didn’t need heirs, no grandchild of mine will be fed to the Old One.”

Rufio’s expression changed. “Grandchild?”

She sneered. “Somehow, your lack of knowledge makes you even more pathetic. You know why she never told you? Because she didn’t trust you to keep it secret. Her annulment is too precious to her.”

Rufio peered at her, baffled. And then, to her surprise, he cackled — as if genuinely amused. “Trelawna’s annulment is the only precious thing to her,” he finally said. “There’s no grandchild. She wouldn’t let me lie with her until we were lawfully married.”

“What?”

Now it was Rufio’s turn to sneer, though he also cringed with pain. “We lay together once, but many years ago.” His cackle became a full-throated laugh.