A little over an hour later, and Samakarantha stepped out the front door of Hissocking Sprent. He self-consciously avoided stepping on the threshold stone, choosing to stride across it, and avoiding the bones that lay somewhere down in the earth beneath. The gloomy watchfulness of the house fell away behind him as he crossed the square. For a short while, he felt an unpleasant prickling on the nape of his neck, as if the eyes of a great beast were on him, but the sensation dwindled as he moved farther away.
And although the magus tried to keep up a stride, although he did his best to keep his spine straight and his head high, nonetheless, he felt an thorough exhaustion in every inch of his body.
The ritual had taken its toll. What he felt now was the sort of deep tiredness that comes right out of the bones. A painfulness lay threaded there, in muscle and along the length of his marrow. It even hurt in his ribs as he breathed. He could not have been more worn down if he’d run for a dozen miles under a hot desert sun. But he had performed the deed: the ghosts were given over to the long rest. Although the girl had gone gently, the remnant of the lord’s son had not wanted to depart so peacefully. He had been difficult to convince by words alone. In the end, it had come down to sheer imposition of will. This was not the method that Samakarantha preferred. It was so much harsher than words. So much more cruel. He was left feeling queasy inside after imposing the power of his will upon a dead soul, even one so awful and vicious as had been the spectre in the dark room.
So, in a state of mild fugue and extreme weariness, he made his way over the hard cobbles and up along interlocking chains of narrow alleyways that took him uphill.
Folks saw him as he walked. Some whispered to one another on doorsteps. Some leaned out of second storey windows to get a better look. A few children gawped. The mood struck him as oddly tense, as if some news or rumour had put everyone into a state of fear. They did not seem to be afraid of him though, Samakarantha thought. It was something else. This seemed to be confirmed when one young mother with a babe in her arms came hesitantly up to him, curtseyed and said, “Thank you, Laird Magus. Thank you for the fixed roofs and the glass in the windows and the food in the cupboards.”
He still felt disconcerted by this, and had half-forgotten that he had even done it. The magic had run so wild and gone so far beyond what he had intended. All the same, he smiled and he nodded, and said, “And gratitude and kind will be upon you too, good mother.”
She smiled, backed away and returned to her doorway.
He was only a way farther along the cobbled road, when three men in grey and brown hauberks appeared at the end of the street, looking about, peering this way and that. When they spied Samakarantha, one of them pointed. Another nodded. The third called out, “Hoy! You the foreigner wizard?”
“I am,” he answered.
A voice behind him spoke. “Oh. Looks like the Dingy Footmen wants you. Watch out then.”
He looked over his shoulder. It was the young mother. She chewed her lower lip and had a worried expression. “They do as the king demands, but they aren’t always gentle. Just take care.”
“I will,” he said, putting assurance in his voice.
He turned back to the men as they approached. Each of them carried a short halberd of a sort that town guard often use. Their livery and badges, which at first looks merely like dirty browns and greys marked with three misshapen triangles, turned out to be intentionally dyed that dustpan colour. The triangles were drab mottled moths arranged in a triangular pattern.
Dingy Footmen indeed, thought Samakrantha.
When they were close enough to converse rather than holler, he spoke to them. “Are you to escort me to the king?”
“We are to make sure you come to the king when summoned. Quick smart. No lallygagging about, you hear?”
“I am already on my way, and although I somewhat suspect that to ‘lallygag’ is a contemptuous term, I have a mind to be politick and overlook the usage of the word, and therefore consider this to be an honoured escorting by royal guards.”
One of the guards said, “Huh?”
Another man rubbed his nose, sniffed and said, “Be fancy about it, if you like. Same to us, long as you come along.”
“Well then. Come along, I will.”
And with that the four of them walked back up the way from which the Dingy Footmen had come.
The houses and yards on either side of the road grew steadily more prosperous as they wound ever upwards. The rather squat and brutish looking castle grew in size. What had been a grey and featureless mass of stone soon gathered about itself details. The stonework varied in colour, subtly, here and there. Arches and carven expanses of stone that had not been visible from a distance formed themselves into patches of detail. The climbing honeysuckle, which had seemed the only splash of turned out to be a vast mass of flowers, as wide across and tall as the side of a hill. Despite his earlier judgement from afar, Samakarantha could not help but be a touch impressed by the Castle of Saltstone. Or at least, more than he had expected to be. The architecture remained that of barbarians, and the carvings were flat and artless, but there was a sort of grand overbearing air to the place that at least conveyed very clearly that this was a castle to be reckoned with.
The castle itself was built out of a broad tabletop of rock. The cliffs that hemmed the walls had seagulls floating around them, and were spotted with endless little green-grey tussocks growing out of ledges and cracks. The way grew very steep as it ascended to meet the lowest feet of the cliffs, upon which the first gate of the fortress stood. The street here was paved with a slippery sort of shale, presumably to stop attackers from gaining easy purchase, though it would make ascent with wagons difficult. Perhaps foods and ale were hoisted up by some other means? Samakarantha was feeling quite winded by the time they reached those first gates.
The guards seemed to find this amusing.
Seeing the expressions of their faces, he did his best to take up again some semblance of serious composure. “I am a magician,” he said. “I do not climb slopes for amusement.”
The Dingy Footmen just smirked. One of them suffocated a mild snort.
“Have they no hills where you hail from?” asked another of them.
“Certainly they do. But in my homelands we have discovered the ancient and esoteric art of the stairway.”
They thought that was funny, rather than insulting, which he supposed he should be thankful for. Her even did his best to laugh along with them.
At the gate, they approached more guards in the dismal grey and brown livery. They stood together in a loose, slightly anxious crowd. Samakarantha noticed they were all looking in the same direction, mutely, and intent in their expressions. He stopped and turned to look himself. The slope they had ascended now provided a view in every direction over the rooftops of Brae, except that was for west where the fortress stood over them. Eastward lay a sprawl of sombre shoreline and the sparkle of sunlight on grey-green waters. South, the lands seemed to roll onward forever, forming a series of vales and hills, quilted by farmland and spotted with small woodlands, vanishing in misty far off lines.
But it was to the north that the guards stared. Those lands rucked themselves up into a vast rugged highlands that strode higher and higher with each passing ridge in the distance, until a vague blue mountainous range occupied the utmost horizon. As he looked over the rows of hills, he realised what it was that had the guards so serious in their mood. At least a hundred fires smoked. Some were very distant. Some were nearer. Some seemed huge, churning out billows of smoke. Some were mere threads of wispy black. But all of them were the harsh black of towns on fire. Burning stubble off fields, hearths and bonfires do not make smoke like that. It take paint and old wood, rugs, dead animals and corpses to produce that sort of smoke. Each long tendril of soot twined upwards, only to be caught and hang in the upper skies as a heavy layer. He turned his eyes to the nearer distance. A road could be seen coming out of those northern hill-lands, not much more than a ribbon of brown mud. It was a road made for a few carts, some donkeys, perhaps a royal train of carriages every few years. It was not a road meant to be packed with feet, but today the road was thronged. That was the only word for it. A wide column of shambling shapes approached from the north: they overspilled the road on both sides, mostly on foot, some in wagons, a few on horseback. At first Samakarantha thought that he was too late and that the armies of the Old Night and Chaos were already in sight, but the calm, grim detachment of the guards suggested this was not the case. No one was running about with bundles of arrows. No one was setting pots of pitch alight. No cries of alarm were ringing the walls.
“There is warring in the north,” he said at last.
The guards who had accompanied him seemed to decide they had no desire to disturb his contemplation of the scene. They stood with him and waited a moment. Eventually, one nodded and spoke. “Them are the folks who are coming south. The old. The young. The weary. The sick. And those not fit to fight, or not willing to. They started arriving this morning. Just a few. Just a haggard trickle. Now there are whole townfuls of people coming over the tops of the hills, along the road, out of the highlands and highfelds.”
“What will the king do?”
“What can he do?” said another man. “There’s not food for so many, but the gates cannot be shut against them. They will be allowed to pass into the city. Hopefully, most will keep walking south. The walls of Old Brae Port will not be a safe place for thousands of hungry and foot-weary souls. Especially not if the things that follow are close on their heels.”
“Soon enough, it may be that the old and the young of Brae will be going out by the south gate too. No mother with bairns at the hem will want to be trapped in these walls. Not if the tales are true.”
“What are those tales?”
“Vast armies. Huger than a mind can imagine. And not just coming south out of the Dragon Gates from Sorthe. Weird creatures coming out of the Pass of the Faces too, away in the west. And armies out of Goathland, marching south and east, towards Heathre and Fadenlauf.”
“I see,” said Samkarantha. “I have perhaps arrived in time, I hope, but it will be a close thing.”
“If your arts can turn away the King of the Cold Harpers and his bleak beasties, then I wager you’ll be buried up to your neck in gold.” A shrug. “If you want it.”
“My arts may not be sufficient, in their own, but I can bring certain powers to bear that will be of assistance. As for the bathing in gold, that I do not want. Sounds uncomfortable. But, I will do what I may do, when the hour comes that there are night-monsters at the gates.”
“May the Brightsome Lady have mercy upon us all, if it should come to that.”
There was a muttering of “Aye” among the men, some nodding and further mumbling of oaths.
This was disturbed by one of the guardsmen who was accompanying Samakarantha. “Best not delay any longer. The king is waiting, after all.”