Deep Water (24 page)

“Later. My lord, Carlion is attacked.”

Thegan straightened, his attention like an arrow finding its mark.

“Who? Not old Ceouf?”

The man shook his head.

“Not by the living, lord. By the dead.”

A stir ran through the men.

“To my tent,” Thegan said, nodding to his officers to follow. Leof supported the man until he sank onto the bench before Thegan’s
work table.

“Now,” Thegan said.

“I tried to warn the Council,” the man said in a flat voice leached by exhaustion. “I’m a stonecaster, I saw disaster coming
on us and I warned them. Every stonecaster in the city warned them, but there was no way we could read the truth in the stones
and no way we could prepare for such an attack.”

“The dead,” Thegan said. “An attack by the dead?” His voice was carefully noncommittal.

The man smiled. An intelligent smile. “It sounds mad, I know. You remember the enchanter who tried to raise the ghosts against
Acton? To give them strength and body?”

Thegan nodded. Everyone knew that story. After Acton’s men had taken Turvite, a mad enchanter had tried to raise a ghost army
against him, the ghosts of those he had killed. The story said she had wanted to make them solid so they could fight again,
but when that failed, she tried to use the ghosts to frighten Acton away. Acton had laughed at her, asking why he should fear
the dead when he had already defeated them alive? He wanted his people to live with a reminder of their victory. He laughed
as he said it, and she cursed him with the loss of the only thing he held dear, that he should never have what he most wanted,
but he shrugged and said he already had it, and gestured to the city. Then she jumped off the cliffs.

“Someone has found a way to do what she could not. Someone has given ghosts a strong arm.” He paused, coughing, and Leof handed
him the waterskin again. This time he drank deeply and sighed afterward.

“They came at night, maybe a hundred of them. Only a hundred, but nothing could stop them. We had been warning the town for
a week and most men slept with their weapons by their bed, so the ghosts found resistance, but it was a slaughter anyway.
How can you kill someone who is already dead? How can you stop someone who feels no pain, who does not bleed?”

Leof imagined such a battle and felt himself pale. The other officers clearly felt the same. Thegan’s face was unreadable,
but familiar to Leof. It was the face of his general, a battle-hardened officer who had faced fierce enemies many times, and
had found solutions where others had seen only disaster. The ability was one of the reasons his men followed him blindly — Thegan
could always see a way clear even when they could not.

“Cut off their arms,” he said. “Cut off their legs.”

The man nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That might work. But lord, it would take a trained fighting man to do that, and we were just
merchants! They killed… they killed so many . . .”

“So you ran.”

“I fought,” the man said bitterly, and pulled his sleeve up to show a long wound, barely crusted over. “Then I realized that
perhaps no one would survive, and what we needed was an army. So I came to you. I have been riding for… I don’t know
how long. Three horses have foundered under me. But it was the night after the full moon when we were attacked.”

Thegan nodded. “You did the right thing. Go and rest now.”

Tib went to the tent flap and called a solider to support the man and take him somewhere he could sleep.

“Wait,” Thegan said. “Your name?”

“Otter,” the stonecaster said. He hesitated. “Lord, when I rested a moment or two, I cast the stones. Carlion was just the
beginning.”

Thegan nodded, his face as grave as Leof had ever seen it.

“Rest,” he said, his hand on Otter’s shoulder comfortingly. “We will manage it from here.”

Otter smiled, a startlingly sweet smile. His eyes were strange, not one color or another. Right now they reflected Thegan’s
brown uniform and shone dark with flecks of gold.

“I knew I was right to come to you. The stones told me so.”

Thegan smiled at him and clapped him on the shoulder in farewell.

Thegan addressed his officers. “Strike camp. We march to Carlion. The nature of the attackers — that stays between us until
the men need to know. We must avoid panic.”

There was nothing else to be said. As Leof turned to go, Thegan stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“A wave from the Lake here, on the same night as the attack on Carlion. No coincidence. Which means this was meant to weaken
us so we could not aid the fight against this ghost army.”

“So,” Leof ventured, hoping to rescue something from this new development, “perhaps it was not a Baluchston enchanter at all?
Someone who could raise the dead like this could certainly control the Lake . . .?”

Thegan looked sharply at him, but nodded. “Perhaps. Still, if one attack has been aimed at us, so may others be. I want you
to ride immediately for Sendat and take control there. The reserves we left there must be trained up fast and hard; call in
the oath men from the villages and begin training them too. We are going to need every spear, I think. As the stonecaster
said, Carlion was just the beginning.”

Leof nodded slowly. Every village owed the warlord men to fight in times of war — the men took an oath to come when called,
and were given weapons and some training in return. But they weren’t soldiers, and they would need much more training before
they could fight effectively.

“I will send out messages from here to the other warlords,” Thegan said. “We must all be prepared. Perhaps other things have
happened elsewhere.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Thegan picked up a knife from the table and studied the way the light fell on its blade. “Protect the Lady Sorn,” he said
softly. “At all costs.”

“With my life, my lord,” Leof said immediately. Thegan shook his head and smiled — not the miraculous smile, but the real
one, the one he kept for people he trusted. It was, as always, like being let into a secret room, a treasure house. Leof couldn’t
help but smile back.

“Not with your life, Leof. I need you to stay alive, too. Let others die for her.”

The combination of intimacy and callousness left Leof not knowing what to say. Thegan threw the knife down onto the table
so that the blade stuck in.

“Get my fort ready for war, Leof. You know what we’ll need.”

Leof nodded. “Train them how to cut off someone’s arms while they’re trying to kill you,” he said dryly.

“Exactly,” Thegan said and smiled the miraculous smile. He handed Leof a sheaf of papers. “Take the list of the dead with
you and inform the families. Ride well.”

Leof hesitated. “Do you have any word for me to take to the Lady Sorn?”

“No time. Just tell her the truth, and that I think of her.”

Leof saluted and left; gathered Thistle, his two remounts, his groom and their gear and was on the road before the last of
the tents had been struck.

Riding out of camp, he couldn’t stop himself wondering why he had been chosen to guard Sendat. Thegan was on his way to give
aid to a free town. To protect it. From inside its gates, no doubt. How long would it need that protection? Forever? Carlion’s
days as a free town were over, it seemed to Leof, and he wondered if he had been dispatched to Sendat in case he developed
any inconvenient scruples about taking over a free town.

The only free town with a harbor near the Central Domain.

“From cliff to cove,” he said aloud, and encouraged Thistle to a canter as they passed the last of Thegan’s pickets. “He’ll
have it all.”

Part of him was proud of his lord’s success, his intelligence and strategy. That was the loyal part, the part that believed
that Thegan’s plan to unite the Domains would bring lawful prosperity to everyone. He concentrated on that part, on thinking
those thoughts. Because that’s who he was, even if he had let Bramble go against Thegan’s orders. He was Lord Thegan’s man,
or he was no one.

T
HE SWORD IN
her hand was heavy, but it was the smell that roused her: the acrid smell of fear-sweat on her own body. That smell was so
unfamiliar to her that she reached out her other senses urgently, only to recoil when she found herself in a man’s body, full
grown. Full grown, but with only one arm. Elric? He was standing on a ledge a small way from the steading, looking out over
the undulating landscape. She judged it was summer, and there was a band of men riding toward him, appearing and disappearing
as they rode over the ridges and into the dales. They were moving fast. Elric was trying to still his quick breath, so he
could shout. He turned half toward the steading.

“They’re coming!”

An indistinct shout of acknowledgment came from the hall, and men with shields and spears ran out. They threw themselves flat
on the ground, taking cover behind rocks and wedging shields in front of them. They held one spear in one hand and a couple
more in the other, and waited, staring intently toward the riders.

A raiding party. A war party. Bramble didn’t want to live through a raid. If Elric lived through it. She didn’t want to die
again. If Elric died while she was with him, what would happen to her? Don’t think about it, she thought. There’s nothing
you can do, so forget it. Where is Acton?

Then she realized that Acton was one of the men — the very young, or old men — who were readying their spears. He was still
only around thirteen or so, and he was smiling. There were other boys, who looked even younger. One of them was probably Baluch,
but she had no idea which one. It was a strange thought, that she could know someone so deeply from the inside but have no
idea what he looked like. The boys were all so young. Bramble supposed that most of the men were off raiding someone else’s
steading, and felt a stab of contempt for them.

Elric cleared his throat. “Wait,” he ordered. “Make every shot count.”

The band approaching them numbered about twenty men, all riding the short, stocky ponies Bramble had seen before. They wore
leather fighting gear, with helmets of what looked like dark wood but which was probably leather. Oddly, they carried no shields.
She was used to seeing the warlord’s men riding, as Thegan’s men had done, with shield on the left arm and right hand free
for the sword. As though her thought had sparked the action, each rider reached for something slung across his back. A bow,
short, curved, lethal-looking. They nocked arrows in unison and let fly. Elric dropped to the ground and Bramble heard the
arrows whistle over, heard some thuds and swearing from his left. Someone had been hit. Elric lifted his face from the ground.

“Shields, ho!” he shouted, and jumped to his feet, letting go his sword and picking up a spear in one movement. Unlike the
other men, he had no shield to cover him. He knew it; it was why he was sweating fear, she realized. He threw the spear, aiming
not at the men, but at the horses. Of course, Bramble thought bitterly. They always suffer first.

Elric had no time to see if his spear had gone home. The raiders let loose another flight of arrows and one took him in the
shoulder, a sudden thud followed by burning pain. She heard Acton shout, “Elric!” and then the waters came up and tumbled
her away.

“There’ll be more before they’ve finished,” Asa’s voice roused her. Bramble was back in a woman’s body, thank the gods, looking
down at Elric this time, swabbing blood away from his shoulder in the hall next to the fire. He looked very pale. With his
shirt off, Bramble could see the scars of earlier fights, and the seared stump of his arm, the skin shiny with the burn marks
of cauterization.

“You were lucky,” the woman she looked through scolded him. It was old Ragni’s voice. “You shouldn’t have been out there at
all, with no shield and jumping up just so they could get a good shot at you.”

Elric bore it silently. “How many?”

Ragni quietened for a moment, spreading leaves — comfrey, from the smell — on the wound. “Two,” she said softly. “Old Weoulf
and that boy of Dati’s. A few wounded.”

“Baluch?”

“He’s fine, he’s fine,” Ragni said, her voice back to normal. “He’s off with Acton and Sebbi, burying the villains. No fire
for them. They can rot in the cold hells.”

A groan interrupted her. She looked over and spat on the floor next to a man lying flat, with no pillows or blankets under
him as there were under Elric. He was bleeding slowly from a stomach wound. The enemy, Bramble presumed. He looked much like
the people from the second wave of the invasion of the Domains, with Merrick’s coloring, auburn hair and hazel eyes. Just
another one of Acton’s people, as far as Bramble was concerned. But not for Acton.

Acton then came in, followed by Asa and a stocky boy with wiry blond hair — Baluch? Bramble wondered — and stood staring at
the man on the floor.

“Water,” the man begged. Bramble understood him, but saw that neither Acton nor Asa did. The gods’ gift worked for this man’s
language too, it seemed. But Ragni had seen a lot of men die in her time, and she knew what he needed.

“Wants water,” she said, her voice cold.

“Give it to him,” Acton commanded.

“Won’t make any difference,” Ragni said. “Gut wound like that, he’s not got long.”

“I want to talk to him,” Acton said, his jaw set. “Give it to him.”

She grumbled under her breath but she filled a drinking horn and handed it to Acton.

He squatted next to the man and lifted his head enough so that the man could drink. Half the water dribbled out the corners
of his mouth. Bramble, too, had seen enough people die to know that Lady Death was standing close by.

“Why do you come?” Acton demanded. “Why do you attack us?”

The man understood. He smiled thinly and muttered three words, “The Ice King.”

His speech was gibberish to everyone except Elric, who twitched on his blanket. “That was my father’s tongue,” he said. “It
means the Ice King.”

“Your king sends you?” Asa asked. “Why?”