This one had wings. Or had had, once. Now it had only tattered shreds of blackness that sent flakes of soot into the sky.
It reminded Rothir strangely of an eagle, although this darkburn was five times an eagle’s size. Yet its head might have been shaped something like a dog’s had it not been burnt into bluntness. It did not bewilder the sight like most smaller darkburns: Rothir could clearly see the charcoaled feet, as big as a lion’s, but more fiercely clawed.
He had two seconds to take all this in, before the darkburn launched itself at them.
It leapt into the air in a wave of heat and made as if it would have dived at them from above. But whatever the wings could once have done, they could not now, in their burnt and shredded state. The darkburn collapsed in a floundering heap on the ground before them, next to a bush which burst instantly into flame.
Welding his sword in a swift arc, Rothir cleaved its neck. It was tough: the head did not fly off but remained half-attached and dangling. There was no blood, merely a shower of soot. The darkburn flailed its rudimentary wings as if struggling to get up.
Both men struck again at the same time, their swords clashing, and now the head did detach itself and toppled quietly on the grass. But the body continued to thrash and writhe and tried to clap its wings, more fire and smoke arising round it constantly.
The two men had to hurriedly withdraw some yards from the heat. Rothir feared for his hair as sparks flew round him. After a few seconds’ respite they looked at each other, nodded, and sprang forward again to finish the thing off. Parthenal slashed at the frantically beating wings, while Rothir hacked at the body, chopping the long tail which writhed independently before falling still.
But the body was still moving, twitching; while around it half the shrubby hillside now seemed to be on fire. They retreated from its heat again to watch it in revulsion. There seemed little harm that the darkburn could do now. The horror which had accompanied it began to slowly fade. Rothir felt that he should put it out of its last misery.
Misery? What misery could it feel? It was already burning of its own volition, creating mindless terror in any human or animal nearby. It was itself already death. How could it suffer?
With these thoughts in his mind, he readied himself to charge into the fire again. But Parthenal beat him to it. He leapt at the fallen darkburn, and swinging his sword furiously he slashed at the twitching body again and again until it was no longer a body but a heap of blackened parts.
“If I had an axe,” he said, panting, “I would use that too.”
They retreated, coughing, to where Maeneb was leaning on her sword. Her face was twisted in shame and sickness.
“I couldn’t attack it,” she said. “It weakened me too much. I couldn’t even lift my sword. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” answered Parthenal. “This one was worse than some. And I think you feel them more intensely than we do.”
“You’ve not met as many darkburns as we have,” added Rothir, wiping the sooty sweat from his brow with his wrist. “We seem to be becoming accustomed to them.”
“Unfortunately,” said Parthenal. He frowned at the blackened, smoking heap. “I’ve seen something like that before.”
“Surely not,” said Maeneb in dismay.
“Not in real life. In a picture. Probably a storybook or some such, years ago. The wings of an eagle, the feet of a lion, the head of a dog. I can’t remember what it was called. But I think it was some exotic beast from far in the west.”
“No such thing exists,” said Rothir.
“Well, this thing definitely does.”
“Proof that it’s a manufacture,” Rothir grunted.
“Do you think this is like the darkburn that attacked Eled?” asked Maeneb.
“No; that one crawled, by Eled’s account,” said Rothir. “It kept close to the ground. Yaret told me the same.”
Maeneb said in a low voice, “I heard Yaret mutter words over the dead stonemen back at the Gyr cave. I feel as if something should be said over this creature too.”
“Words? What words? Curses?” asked Parthenal with disdain.
“There was some ritual that she performed,” said Rothir. He remembered the darkburn graveyard in the swamp; and before that, a tumbling rabbit, Yaret murmuring unheard words. He had his own prayer for the dead, but had never used it on a rabbit.
Maeneb said, “I think they might have been words of appeasement. Apology. Farewell. I don’t know.”
Parthenal snorted. “Apology? Wasted on stonemen – or on darkburns.”
But Rothir, studying Maeneb, asked her, “Why do you feel that something should be said over this one? What is it about this darkburn that makes it different to the others?”
She was silent for a moment. “It’s grief,” she said at last. “I felt such grief, as well as horror.”
He opened his mouth to say that Yaret had felt something of the same. Then he closed it again, because all such feelings were subjective. They proved nothing.
“That’s just an emotion that the darkburns generate,” said Parthenal, “to disarm and dismay. This one happens to be particularly strong.”
“Yes, I know.”
“A more immediate question,” Rothir said, “is what is it doing here? Was it sent here to attack us?”
“I don’t see how. There are no stonemen anywhere nearby,” said Maeneb.
“This must be one of the darkburns whose cart overturned,” suggested Parthenal. “If they couldn’t control it and it got away, it will have been roaming around here for the last day or two, hunting. And found us.”
That seemed to Rothir to be the most likely answer. Perhaps the thing had happened on them by pure chance. Perhaps it smelt them, just as they smelt it. Perhaps it felt their presence…
And what had he felt? Horror, certainly. Grief? He wasn’t sure. But almost a sense of shame. That made no sense, unless it was his own shame at his weakness. He gazed at the smoking remains, and remembered the tears that had stood in Yaret’s eyes back in the swamp.
Needless, pointless. Put it in a box. The thing was destroyed now, that was all that mattered.
“Come on,” he said curtly. “We can’t hang around.”
The left the smouldering remains and continued their trek north. After another mile they came to a point where the stonemen’s trail veered more directly west.
“The eastward group is still only a few miles away,” said Maeneb, “but soon the distances between the two halves of the army will grow wider. We need to decide which group to follow.”
“You still think the eastward group is smaller?”
She nodded. “A few hundred, I think. The other is at least twice the size. But in both directions I feel that impression of stripes and heat within them.”
“The darkburn cages. I wish we knew which of the two armies held Arguril,” growled Parthenal.
Rothir thought, If either of them do, but he said nothing. Never to give up hope even when all reasonable hope seemed dead: the events of the Thore ought to have taught him that.
Maeneb shook her head.
“I have no way of knowing where Arguril is,” she said dolefully. “I still can’t hear him amidst all the other voices. There are too many of them.”
“Statistically,” said Rothir, “he’s more likely to be with the larger group that’s heading west. But we can’t take the risk of pursuing the wrong group and missing him. We need to split up.”
“Then Maeneb and I will ride west,” said Parthenal, “and you go east. We should be able to overtake each group within a day and see if there is any sign of Arguril.”
“We can’t fight an army,” Maeneb objected.
“No. We’ll stay secret. But we need to know where he is and where they’re headed. Maybe together we can do something. Tomorrow evening, or as soon as possible the day after, we will return and rendezvous. Where?”
Rothir looked around, and nodded at a craggy hillock crowned with one lone stunted tree.
“Foot of that greythorn,” he said. Wheeling his horse round, he gave them a brief wave of salute before cantering away. Apprehension spurred him on. There was no time to waste.
He followed a farm-track to the eastern upland. When he turned to check his orientation and to fix the rendezvous landmark in his mind, the other two were already a fair distance west, moving rapidly away from him. Nothing else stirred in the landscape below except the drifts of dirty smoke from the places they had left. A deserted country; like so many. He turned back to the east.
Although it felt strange to be so abruptly solitary again, it was in some ways a relief. It was good to ride at his own speed without halts and distractions. The farm track soon disappeared, but he headed for the pall of smoke that veiled the horizon, and after a few miles he came across the signs of many trampling feet and cart-wheels.
Now with the trail clear before him he could gallop as fast as Narba was prepared to. Although treeless, this was not as bleak and hostile a stretch of moorland as the Iarad had been: the going was firm, and the trampled trail impossible to lose. In fact, he could see it stretching for a full two miles ahead between the clumps of heather, its purple blooms now turned to rust.
There was little but the undulation of the land and a few wandering sheep to obscure his view or hinder his swift progress. He had to tell himself to slow down from time to time, to check for anything that he might miss: broken carts, abandoned bodies.
He saw neither, although this apparently blank land was, once he looked, full of the small signs of life. Narba’s hooves flushed little brown larklets from the heather, along with hares and the occasional squirming fangol; and every time he slowed, he heard over the harsh breathing of his horse the chuckling alarm call of a brindlecock. Not always the same one presumably. Now and then he would inadvertently send one running, its neck stretched out, its stubby wings trying to haul it off the ground. Brindlecocks were so well camouflaged that they were invisible until they moved. A cloak that colour would be useful, he thought; could a weaver reproduce that random pattern of grey and rust? He would have to ask Yaret.
But then he remembered that he would not see Yaret again. The recollection was like a bucketful of water in the face – cold and sobering. It was stupid to keep thinking of her: and quite unnecessary. She was safe. A temporary friend, no more. He set his mind back on the trail.
Soon afterwards he came upon something which sobered him still further. A day or two ago it had been a tranquil hamlet of low-roofed cottages on the far edge of the upland. Now it was a set of smoking ruins.
He approached them warily – an irreverent larklet singing overhead – in case any of the perpetrators were still here. Heat radiated strongly from the buildings. The only inhabitants were the scattered corpses lying in between the houses, barely recognisable as having once been human. Not Arguril. They had worn ear-rings.
Rothir straightened up and looked away and said his prayer. He had said it briefly in his head for the first corpse they had found along the road; but after that he had thought chiefly of vengeance. The memory of Yaret’s murmurings brought a sense of remorse that he had not said it for the others.
So this time, although there was nobody to hear, he spoke the words aloud. An acknowledgement of what had happened in this desolate place. An apology that he could not prevent it. He commended the dead to the power of the stars, while overhead the larklet still kept singing, no longer irreverent but offering its tremulous note of hope – if hope could exist for the dead. Rothir remounted and rode on with cold determination.
An hour later he caught his first sight of the stonemen. By now he had left the stretch of higher land behind and had descended to a more fertile region scattered with gnarled fruit trees and small cottages. Despite their thick stone walls, all of the latter were burnt out, roofless, full of ash and rubble whose heat was like an open oven. An egg thrown on the stones would have fried and shrivelled up in seconds. There were many corpses, all charred so badly that if Arguril had been one of them Rothir would not have been able to tell. He had to trust that he was not.
No bustling brindlecocks ran here: no larklets sang. Only the crows circled, and even they saw nothing in the ruins worth flying down for. But as he glanced up at the crows he became aware of movement through the smoke; a change in the middle distance, perhaps four miles away.
So Rothir spoke his prayer again and then rode on, more cautiously this time, shutting away his anger and anxiety so that they would not distract him. Behind his back, the sun was going down. It illumined his path with a swelling glow of golden fire, as if to show him what had lately happened here. Despite his resolution he could not help imagining the sudden blaze becoming an inferno as the darkburns rushed through the hamlet: the fleeing villagers thrust back into the flames by surrounding stonemen.
His shadow lengthened, a black ghost in a golden land that was fading gradually to grey. It was just after sunset when he found the stonemen’s camp. The army had stopped, not at another hamlet, but at a much more sizeable village – almost a small town – that was surrounded by hedged fields.
Rothir halted Narba in a stand of trees some distance from the nearest buildings. Dismounting and unstrapping his pack, he instructed his horse to stay there in the trees. Yaret’s donkeys came unbidden to his mind… Narba too would get the gist. He did not tether the horse; if he himself were caught, Narba should have the chance to get away. He had the sense and instinct to go and look for the other Riders.
So Rothir left him, to creep up a concealing rise and slink behind the hedges. He skulked past fields of sweetroot leaves and barley stalks to a patch of thorny undergrowth that was close enough to the camp for him to look down at it through the thorns and assess the stonemen’s numbers.
Perhaps a hundred people were in sight, although not all appeared to wear red tunics. No doubt there were many others that he could not see. The carts were clearly visible, however: about a dozen of them, drawn up to the side of a group of low stone barns at the town’s edge.
For all the buildings of this place were still intact. If I were a stoneman deciding to pitch camp, he thought, I’d raid the village first. Kill the inhabitants, eat their animals, steal their food and use their shelter. Fire the buildings when I leave.
He felt revulsion at this putting himself inside a stoneman’s head. But it was necessary. Now he checked the wind and studied his surroundings while the light was still sufficient. In some of the narrow hedge-lined fields, cattle stamped or ran, turning in small, panicky stampedes, upset by the nearness of the darkburns. The carts were drawn up in a circle and were faintly smoking. Or perhaps it was the wet ground under them that steamed.
It was still too light for him to try to get any closer. So he watched and waited in his patch of undergrowth. Not until the dusk was growing deep did he finally move. Then he made his careful way down the border of a field he had noted, where he could creep close to the village in the shelter of a high double hedge. The stink and aura of the darkburns became noticeable, and then unpleasant.
At its end nearest to the village, the hedge was tall and thick, a tight double row of beech: he burrowed into it. The leaves crackled against him horribly for a second but once he was in the centre there was enough space for him to crouch and spy through to the other side.
He was at a junction, where an earthen track met the cobbled road that ran into the town, with more paths leading off it. In the twilight he saw small but sturdy houses, built of wood and stone and undefended by any encircling walls. It was an ordinary little country townlet, which had probably never thought it needed any defending walls until today.
Groups of stonemen patrolled the streets which were empty of living inhabitants but littered with the dead; in one spot he could see corpses piled in a careless heap. The stonemen were still plundering houses for food, kicking open doors and charging in, to emerge minutes later with armfuls of bread or bulging sacks.
One stoneman entered a house opposite him: immediately there came a yell. A man – a grey-haired villager – dived out of the open door into the street, followed by the shouting stoneman. The villager turned and stabbed his pursuer with a short knife before two more stonemen dragged him off and disarmed him. The fight was over very quickly.
But the stonemen did not kill the hapless villager. They shoved him down the road a little way past the junction where Rothir was hiding, and there tied him to a tree. There was some consultation between them.
Meanwhile another stoneman went up to his bleeding comrade and turned him over roughly; the man was evidently dead. Somewhat to Rothir’s surprised disgust, the stoneman did not make any gesture of regret or pity towards his fellow-soldier. He did not even bother to move the corpse aside.
Instead he took from his belt what looked like a pair of pliers, and applied them to the blood-spattered victim’s head, prising out the stones set in the skull. It seemed to take considerable effort. He dropped the stones inside a metal box: Rothir could hear the series of small clunks. As the stoneman pulled at the last stone, it flew from the pliers’ grip and bounced across the road, landing on the grassy verge not far from the hedge where Rothir was concealed.
With a muttered curse, the stoneman crossed the road to look for it, poking around in the weeds and grass some distance from where the stone had actually fallen. He was a mere three yards from Rothir, who kept entirely still. If the stoneman had looked up and paid attention he could have seen him even in the dusk. But he did not. After a moment or two he gave up the search and went back, grumbling, to his companions.
And then there was a stir among the carts drawn up on the north side of the village, to Rothir’s left. Movement, stonemen’s voices, and a heavy clang: one of the cages had been opened.
A minute later, apprehension gripped him. Down the road there came a darkburn rushing towards him in a whirl of heat and shadow.
Rothir froze. Three following stonemen waved the darkburn on, driving it before them. Although they held long whips they did not use them.
Why were they doing this? Had they freed the darkburn to hunt down any intruders? Fear wrapped itself round Rothir. Part of it was the rapidly growing horror of the darkburn’s aura; but part was far more rational. If the darkburn were to sense his presence it would fling itself towards the hedge, setting both it and him burning. He swiftly planned his escape route were that to happen – at the same time knowing that escape would be unlikely. If he ran he would be seen at once. If he did not run he would be burnt alive.
So don’t move until it’s absolutely necessary, he told himself. The darkburn hurtled on towards him. Still motionless, he felt the wave of sudden heat ahead of it, as if an oven had been opened. But he held his ground.
Just before the heat became too fierce, the darkburn swerved aside. It veered away from him, moving in a wide arc around his section of the hedge. It struck Rothir that it might be avoiding, not him, but the place where the lost stone had fallen.
And then, as it whirled on down the track, the darkburn sensed another prey. It gained speed. In a blurring haze of darkness it flung itself at the tree and the man tied to it. There was a hideous sound and a searing blaze of heat. Rothir turned his head, but he was unable to shut out the crackle and roar of flames. He hoped it would be quick.
That it had been extremely quick was evident when he raised his head again some minutes later: both tree and man were burnt to white-hot embers. Smoke billowed up and was lost in the darkening sky. The darkburn was being herded back towards the carts: he watched carefully to see how the stonemen did it.
Again, they did not use their whips. Although one bore a spear it was not needed either. As they moved towards the darkburn, it veered away from them.
And now for the first time Rothir thought he understood their power over the darkburns. It lay in the stones around their heads. He did not know how that might work, but it surely must be so.
The darkburn was driven back into its cage: although he could no longer see it, he heard the clash of an iron door being slammed. Next there came a bellow, as an ox was herded past him by another pair of stonemen, to disappear up the street into the village. From the subsequent noises he suspected it was killed and butchered on the spot. The glow and sparks of a fire showed where it was being cooked – probably in the village square.
The stonemen in his sight-line hurried off towards the fire. Gradually the smell of roasting ox and mutton mingled with the darkburn stench, not doing a great deal to improve it.
By now the blue twilight was as thick as water. The sparking fires – for two others had sprung up within the town – were bright by contrast, making the darkness elsewhere even darker. Rothir could see no stonemen now. They had set no sentries, evidently feeling themselves safe from attack.
Well, they had a point, he thought grimly. While there was still a modicum of light, he eased himself out of the hedge.
First he looked for the lost stone. He had noted carefully where it fell and even in the dusk it did not take too long for his fingers to alight upon it. It was unmistakable: a long, worked flint, or similar rock, rounded at one end and sharpened to a fierce point at the other. Shreds of flesh still clung to it. He wiped it on the grass and put it in his pocket.
Then he moved silently towards the carts, using the abandoned houses as cover. When he could see the whole group of carts, he counted them: twelve, of which eight seemed to hold cages. Although they were black against the indigo dusk of their surroundings, the bars of the central ones glowed darkly red. These carts were drawn up in a rough circle, while those without cages stood a little further back; he thought that they most likely held supplies. He crawled towards them through the grass until the heat became uncomfortable. Much closer, and it would be unbearable.
Yet someone had to bear it. Men – not stonemen – sat slumped and either tied or shackled by the legs, in three long rows. These were men enslaved to pull the carts: that much seemed clear. Probably they had been collected at various villages along the way, the stonemen capturing any young men before they killed the rest.
Again he counted. Just over fifty men: so four men for each cart, plus a few to spare. Two red-clad stonemen sat nearby, beside a pair of spluttering torches, eating greedily and flicking idle whips at the captive men from time to time.
Rothir scanned the rows of huddled prisoners carefully in the almost non-existent light, trying to see if any of them looked like Arguril. It was too dark. He could not tell.
He contemplated creeping up to kill the guards – he could dispatch at least one before they would even know that he was there; but they were too far apart for him to kill both swiftly, and the second might sound the alarm before he fell. Then he would still have to hunt for Arguril, unshackle him – if he was amongst the captives – and whether he was there or not, fight off the hundred or more enemies that would soon come running.
Even as he dismissed the idea, one of the captive men began to wail. It was some poor villager calling out the names of his lost family, who were most likely lying slaughtered in the street. Rothir found his fist was clenched.
“Shut the noise!” yelled one of the guards. “You want to end up like the one just down the road? Shut up or we’ll feed you to the burners!”
The man kept wailing. The guard stood up, picked up a torch and strode towards the line of shackled men to give one of them a vicious lash with the long whip.
There was a sudden clatter and a heavy thump from the nearest cage. Rothir saw a thing of darkness hurl itself against the glowing bars – away from the stoneman, who had evidently got too close to it. The stoneman stopped and moved away from the cage before he lashed the prisoner again.
Rothir measured that distance, between stoneman and cage, with his eye. About six yards. As the stoneman strolled back towards his seat, he tripped over something and swore. There was the rattle of a metal chain; that must be what was shackling the rows of captive men together.
The stoneman swung his torch round briefly, to allow him to release his foot. The torchlight shone upon the nearest prisoner, lighting up a brow, a nose, a face – and Rothir knew that he saw Arguril.