Hawkwood's voyage

THREE

Bardolin’s imp was restless. It was the heat. The little creature darted from inkwell to table lantern, its green tongue lolling. Finally it collapsed in a heap atop the parchment the wizard had been working on and scratched behind one hairy ear with the nub of an old quill, covering itself with ink.

Bardolin chuckled and lifted it gently up to the shelf. Then he smoothed the parchment and continued to write.

The Prelate of Abrusio is not, of course, an evil man, but he is an ambitious one, and with the fall of Macrobius there is a certain hiatus. All five of the Prelates will be watching events along the Searil with an interest that goes beyond the mere outcome of siege and battle. Will Macrobius surface again? That is the question. It is rumoured that eight thousand of the Knights Militant have already been set aside for policing duties within the borders of the five Kingdoms. Eight thousand! And yet they are to send only five thousand to the Searil defences. This is a war within a war. These holy men will see the Merduk at their altars ere they will lift a finger to help another of their rank. It is the Inceptine disease, this empire-building. It may yet bring the west to its knees.

He paused. It was late, and the stars were hanging bright and heavy over the humid, sleeping city. Now and then he would catch the cry of a night watchman or one of the city patrol. A dog barked and there was the sudden splurge of laughter from some revellers leaving an all-night tavern. The offshore breeze had not yet picked up, and the reek of the burning hung over the city like a shroud.

I tell you, Saffarac: leave Cartigella while there is time. This madness will spread, I am sure of it. Today it is Hebrion, tomorrow it will be Astarac. These holy men will not be happy until they have burnt half the west in their zeal to outdo one another in piety. A city is not a safe place to be.

Again, he stopped. Would it revert to the way it had been in the beginning? The Dweomer-folk reduced to petty oldwifery, the doctoring of dry cows in some mountain village. There would be a welcome in such a place, at least. The country-folk understood these things better. Some of them still worshipped the Horned One in nights of moon up in the Hebros.

He dipped his quill in the inkwell but the pen remained unmoving in his fingers. A drop of ink slipped down the nib and drip, dripped on to the parchment, like a raven tear. The imp watched Bardolin from its shelf, chirruping quietly to itself. It could sense his grief.

He knuckled his bloodshot eyes, grimaced at the blotted page, and then wrote on.

They took away my apprentice today. I have made protests, enquiries, even bribes; but nothing will answer. The Inceptines have begun to whip up fear, and with the news from the east that is no hard task. When it started, the soldiers would sometimes look the other way: now they also have the sniff of fanaticism about them. It is rumoured, though, that King Abeleyn disapproves of the scale of the purge and keeps the Prelate from even worse excesses. They burned forty today, and they hold half a thousand in the catacombs for want of space in the palace cells. God forgive them.

He halted a third time. He could write no more, but it would have to be finished tonight for there might not be time in the morning. He sighed and continued.

You are high in the councils of King Mark. I beg you, Saffarac, use your influence with him. This hysteria must be halted before it sweeps all the Ramusian states. But if you see no hope, you must get some of our folk out. Gabrion will take them, I am sure, and if not Gabrion then the Sea-Merduks.

Desperate times, to suggest such remedies. Take care, my friend. May God’s light shine ever on your path.

He signed and sealed the letter, and his eyes stung with tiredness. He felt worn and old. A dispatch-runner would take it on the morning tide, if this calm lifted and the north-west breeze struck up again.

His imp was asleep. He smiled at the little creature, the last in a long line of familiars. They would come for him tomorrow as they had come today for young Orquil, his apprentice. A promising lad, he had been, already at home in cantrimy and beginning to learn the way of mindrhyming, perhaps the least understood of the Seven Disciplines.

He knew why they had not taken him today.

Bardolin had been a soldier once upon a time. He had served with one of the tercios which currently garrisoned Abrusio and he knew their commanding officer well. His. . abilities had begun to manifest themselves on a campaign against bandits in the Hebros. They had saved lives. The ensign had recommended him for promotion, but he had left to study thauma-turgics under Golophin, a great name, even then.

That had been thirty years ago, but Bardolin still had the carriage of a soldier. He kept his hair brutally short and his broken nose gave him the appearance of a prize fighter. He did not look like a wizard, a master of at least four of the Realms of Dweomer. He looked more like the hard-bitten sergeant of arquebusiers that he had once been, the tell-tale scars at his temples speaking of long years wearing the iron helmet of the Hebriate soldiery.

That’s why they left me, he thought. But they’ll be back tomorrow, no doubt, with one of the Ravens prodding them on.

A distant tumult outside. A rattle of hard voices, feet spattering on the cobbles.

Had they come for him already?

He stood up. The imp sprang awake, its eyes glowing.

The feet pattered past, the shouts faded. Bardolin relaxed, chiding himself for his hammering heart.

An arquebus shot. It ripped the night quiet apart. Another, and then a ragged volley. There was a huge animal howling, and men began to scream.

Bardolin leapt to the window.

Dark streets, the sliver of a moon shining faintly off cobbles. Here and there a yellow light flickering. If he leaned out far enough he could see the glitter of moonlight on the Western Sea. Abrusio slept like a tired old libertine made weary by his excesses.

Where, then?

“Go, my friend; be my eyes for me.”

The imp’s eyes dulled. The useless wings on its back flapped feebly. It darted out of the window and appeared to leap into empty space, though the air was so warm and thick it seemed a different element, capable of buoying the tiny body up like a leaf.

Now, yes. Bardolin was seeing in the spectrum of the imp’s vision. A lantern at a window was a green flare, too bright to look at. A rat made a small luminosity and the imp changed its swift scamper in pursuit, but Bardolin held it to his will again, reproved it gently and sent it on its way.

A leap between two roofs, an unbelievably quick series of gymnastic movements and the imp was in the street scurrying along in the gutter, ignoring the rats now. There was a confused glow up ahead, green figures dancing. But one towered over the rest, and shone as brightly as a bonfire. The heat from it was a palpable thing on the imp’s clammy skin.

A shifter cornered by the city patrol! And it was already badly wounded. Bardolin noted the three corpses which lay in fragments around the street. The shifter was giving a good account of itself, but that last volley had caught it at point-blank range and even its immense vitality was waning. The lead balls had ripped through the great chest and out of the muscles of the back. Already the wounds were repairing themselves, but the arquebusiers were reloading with panicked haste, not daring to go near the dying creature. The darkened street was sickening with the reek of gore and slow-match and powder smoke.

“Damn you all,” the shifter said clearly, despite its beast’s mouth. “You and all black-robed carrion. You have no right-”

A bang. One fellow, reloading faster than the rest, fired his weapon at the huge, long-eared skull. The shifter’s head bounced back to hit the wall behind it. The jaws opened, roaring, and the black tongue lolled wetly.

Others fired. Bardolin’s imp whimpered but remained at its station, impelled by its master’s will. It shut its sensitive eyes to the flashes of the volley, poked tiny fingers in its ears and cowered appalled as the patrol fired ball after ball into the massive beast. Pieces of flesh, dark-furred, were blasted off to litter the cobbles. One of the luminous yellow eyes went dark.

People began coming out of their houses. The entire district was waking to what sounded like a small battle being fought in their midst. Lantern light spilled out in pools and wands on the cobbles. The stouter-hearted ventured close to the inferno of noise and light that was the firing patrol, saw what they were aiming at and hurried back into their homes, barring their doors.

The noise stopped. The street was an opaque fog of powder smoke and the patrolmen shouted to one another reassuringly in the midst of it. They had used all their charges, but the beast was dead-sure to be after having thirty rounds blasted into it.

“Ho, Harlan, where are you? Can’t see a thing in this powder brew!”

“I claim its paw, Ellon. It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen.”

“Where in the name of the Saint is it?”

There was a silence, heavy with fear. The powder smoke refused to clear; in fact if anything it was growing thicker by the moment. The arquebusiers blundered around, terrified, sure that the shifter had somehow called up a fog and was still alive in the midst of it, biding its time.

“Sorcery!” one wailed. “The beast lives! It’ll be at our throats in a moment. This is no gunpowder smoke!”

Their sergeant tried to rally them, but they made off, some dropping their weapons, seeking only to get away from the unnatural smoke. They scattered, shouting, whilst the folk who lived on the street shuttered their windows despite the heat of the night and knelt behind locked doors, quaking.

Slowly , my little comrade, slowly. Look into him. Can you see the heat? Is that the radiance of his heart, beating yet? Yes! See how the bright bloodlines clot and heal themselves, the darker holes knit together and close. And there is the eye rebuilding itself, pushing out again like an air-filled bladder.

Bardolin was trembling with strain. Casting was difficult enough at the best of times without having to relay it through his familiar. And now the creature was edging out of his control, like a tool slipping in sweat-blurred hands. It wanted to come home to its safe, quiet shelf, but Bardolin was making it approach the great body that lay seemingly inert on the ground with its blood a thick sticky pool around it.

A hairy piece of meat slithered across the stones and reattached itself to the shifter.

Bardolin was lucky in the powder smoke. All he had had to do was thicken it, and the still, humid air of the night had done the rest. But now he was attempting something more difficult. Mindrhyming, through the minute skull of the imp. The familiar acted as a buffer, a cut-off, but a frail one. Its heart would fail if it suffered much more stress this night, but there was not much time. The fog was thinning, and the patrol would soon return with reinforcements.

Shifter, can you hear me? Are you listening?

Pain agony light blooming in my skull the muzzles pointing at me rend them tear them drink sweet blood dying. Dying.

Shifter! Listen to me. I am a friend. Look at me. See the imp before you.

The yellow eyes blazed, shot with blood.

“I see you. Whose are you?”

The imp spoke with its master’s voice, quivering with relief. Its brain was near overload. “Bardolin. I am the mage Bardolin. Follow the imp and it will lead you to me.”

The huge muzzle worked. The words came out as a growl.

“Why should you help me?”

“We are brothers, Shifter. They are after us all.”

The shifter raised its blood-mired head off the cobbles and seemed to sigh. “You have the right of it there. Lead on, then, but go slow-and no crevices or cracks. I am no imp that can crawl through keyholes.”

They moved out, the imp scampering ahead, its eyes two green lights shining in the dark, the shifter a hulking, shattered shape behind it. After them the cadenced step of the city patrol came echoing up the street.

The imp was barely conscious by the time it returned, and Bardolin immediately popped it into a rejuvenating jar. The shifter entered the room warily, the candlelight shining on the broken places in its body that had not yet mended. Its heat was overwhelming; a by-product of the sorcery which kept its form stable. Hunched with pain though it was, it towered over Bardolin like some black, spiked monolith, the saffron-bright eyes slitted like a cat’s. Its horn-like ears scraped the ceiling.

“I thirst.”

The mage nodded and sank a gourd dipper in the pail he had prepared. The shifter took it and drank greedily, water running down the fur of the bull-thick neck. Then it slumped to the floor.

“Can you shift back yet?” Bardolin asked.

The creature shook its great head. “My injuries would kill me. I must remain in this form until they are healed. . I am called Tabard, Griella Tabard. I thank you for my life.”

Bardolin waved a hand. “They took away my apprentice today. Tomorrow they will take away me. I have brought you a momentary respite, no more.”

“Nevertheless I am in your debt. I will kill them tomorrow when they come for you, hold them off so you may escape.”

“Escape? To where? The soldiery have Abrusio sealed off tighter than a virago’s bustle. There is no escape for the likes of us, my friend.”

“Then why did you aid me?”

Bardolin shrugged. “I do not like wanton slaughter.”

The shifter laughed, a hideous sound in the beast’s mouth. “You say that to the likes of me, a sufferer of the black disease? Wanton slaughter is half my nature.” The creature sounded bitter.

“And yet, you do not kill me.”

“I. . I would not harm a friend. Like a fool I came down out of the Hebros, seeking a cure for my affliction, and arrived here in the midst of a purge. I killed my father, Mage.”

“Why?”

“We are a simple folk, we mountain dwellers. He tried to force me.”

Bardolin was puzzled, and the beast laughed again. “No matter. You will understand in the morning maybe. For now, I am hurt and weary. I would sleep here if you’ll let me.”

“For tonight you will be my guest. Is there anything I can do for your hurts?”

“No. They heal themselves. It takes a lot to kill a full-blooded shape-shifter, though no doubt your magicks could do so in a trice. Those stinking militia thought to use me for their sport, and before I could stop myself the change was upon me. Then the hue and cry began. Six of them at least I slew. I was fortunate. Some of them have taken to using iron balls in their arquebuses. That would have been my end.”

Bardolin nodded. Iron and silver were the only things which disrupted the magical regenerative powers of a shifter. Golophin had presented a paper on the subject to the Mages’ Guild only the year before, little knowing it would soon be put to use.

Bardolin yawned. His imp stared dreamily at him from the liquid depths of its jar. He tapped the glass, and the little mouth smiled vaguely. It would be recovered in the morning. Some mages, it was rumoured, had bigger jars made for themselves to rejuvenate their ailing bodies, but there was the cautionary tale of the treacherous apprentice who had not followed instructions and had left his master in the jar to smile dreamily for all eternity.

“I’m for bed,” he told his monstrous guest. “You are safe here tonight; the imp made sure you were not followed. But it will be dawn in less than four hours. If you wish to make good your escape before then you are welcome.”

“I will be here when you wake,” the shifter insisted.

“If you will. The soldiers usually come midmorning, after a hearty breakfast and a tot of rum.”

The shifter grinned horribly. “They will have need of their rum if they are to take us.”

Us? Bardolin thought. But his bed was calling him. Perhaps tomorrow night he would be sharing a pallet of bare stone with Orquil in the catacombs.

“Goodnight, then.” He tottered off to bed, an old man in need of rest. The Dweomer always did that to him, and working through the imp had been doubly exhausting.

H E woke up, though, in the dark hour before the dawn with a name going through his head.

Griella?

And when he crept downstairs, instead of the monstrous, bloodied beast, he saw sleeping on his floor the pale shape of a nude young woman.