Byzantium, Book 1: Dead Men's Road Read online

  ***

  The attack came during the mid-watch. Half a dozen men slid over the south wall where the shadows were darkest, hoping to take the watchmen unawares. They were doing rather well until they knocked over some old glass bottles that had been strung out in a neat row along the pavement by Fitz as a crude alarm system.

  Santar heard the noise. “Alarm! Intruders!”

  The bandit vanguard realized their only chance now was to silence the watchmen and keep the camp too occupied to prevent the remainder of their number forcing the makeshift barrier at the western gate. They raced forward to attack the guards before most of them could rise from their sleeping mats.

  Kirkgrim stretched out his black staff and tripped two of the intruders over onto the snoring Sigroth. The Viking, rudely awoken from a dream involving beer, loot, and more beer, reacted instantly by cleaving both men with his axe before getting up to look for more trouble.

  “Over there,” the Wanderer advised him. “There’s plenty of folks to handle these fellows, but there’s hordes of them forcing the gate that you can fight all by yourself.”

  “Death, gore, and glory!” shouted the Viking as he pelted over to engage the invaders.

  He wasn’t to be alone at the breach, though. The first man to climb over the temporary gate died with Fitz’s arrow through his throat. An armored truffle pig savaged the second. Then Sigroth fell upon the rest like a natural disaster.

  The remaining intruders chose fire as a distraction. They hurled branches from the campfire onto a couple of the open wagons and one of the overnight tents. In the confined courtyard of the waystation this was a serious diversion. Travelers awoke to combat and smoke. People screamed and shouted contradictory orders. Already one of the defenders lay on the ground in a pool of blood.

  Lady Mirabelle emerged from her wagon wrapped in her white mantle as the battle raged right outside her door. A pair of brigands saw her as an obvious hostage. She had other ideas. She formed an elaborate gesture with her hands, enunciated something in the old high tongue, and blew at her assailants. They fell at once into a deep, unwakeable sleep.

  “A mage!” Kirkgrim guessed. “She casts magics! This gets better and better.”

  “Thank you,” Mirabelle responded, although the Wanderer had not been directly addressing her. “Now do you not think that you should deal with those fires yonder?”

  “Me?”

  “That red knotted acorn tassel on your gown, it’s a symbol of the Children of Danu, the gods of Albion, is it not?” the lady demanded. “And one of the blessings given to holy men of that calling is manipulation over the elements? Or have you not gained the wisdom and seniority to perform such miracles?”

  “Be wet,” Kirkgrim told the smoldering carts, sullenly, and the flames died down and became black pungent fumes. “You’re taking all the fun out of this adventure, you know.”

  “I apologize.” Mirabelle shrugged. “Now I suggest you use your healing gifts on that fallen guard over there.”

  The battle was over by the time Kirkgrim had laid hands on the injured watchman and closed the worst of his wounds. He also pressed a healing salve onto the injured man’s scars to keep them free from infection.

  “They ran off!” Sigroth Sigrothson objected loudly. “Cowards! Come back and die!”

  Fitz indicated the five bandit corpses and the two magic-drowsed felons that remained behind. “They didn’t all run off.”

  III. On Secrets and Revelations

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were a holy man?” Padavas the Portly demanded of Kirkgrim Carrionwake. “I would have given you free passage if I’d known you had the healing touch and divinatory gifts.”

  “I prefer to travel anonymously,” the Wanderer shrugged, “and I had the money. It was donated to me by some fellows in Orestinus who I helped cure of their gambling habit.”

  Brother Jastus of the Order of St Temensus looked up admiringly from his work amongst the guards bandaging minor grazes and contusions. “You are most blessed indeed to be granted the miracles of the deities, holy one.”

  “Thank you.” the Wanderer winced. “See? That’s why I travel anonymously,” he muttered, gesturing to the wide eyed monk.

  “Which god do you serve?” Hodis wondered, eyeing the gray cloaked traveler. The only thing that might pass for a holy symbol or badge of office was the old acorn fastened by a chain to his tunic.

  “I have an… understanding with the gods of the Northern Isles, the children of Mother Goddess Danu,” Kirkgrim admitted.

  “And who especially?” wondered Mirabelle. “It is customary for priests there to have a patron with whom they share certain traits, is it not?”

  “You seem to be a very well informed secret mage,” the Wanderer noted ruefully. “I observe that you didn’t let anyone know you were an acolyte of the occult.”

  “I observe that you avoided the question, Kirkgrim Carrionwake.”

  The Wanderer nodded ruefully. “I have the patronage of Lugh the long-handed, the Samildanach, the Master of All Arts.”

  “And so you resemble him in being competent at everything?”

  The Wanderer smiled helplessly. He had a very charming, roguish grin. Clearly wooing was amongst those arts.

  “Modest,” Mirabelle responded dryly.

  “He performed a miracle on the flames,” Brother Jastus reported. “He merely commanded them and they died.”

  Kirkgrim tried to play it down. “Elements are easy if you know how to talk to them.”

  “You saved me too,” the injured guard croaked. Whilst far from well, Truder the Younger would recover with nothing worse than some new battle scars. “I felt a great warmth and my wounds closed up.”

  “Sometimes the gods decide to do that on request, sometimes they don’t,” the Wanderer pointed out. “Repay them by being a good man – and by not telling everyone what happened. The rumors will be bad enough. By tomorrow morning everyone in the caravan will be brandishing their bunions and goiters for me to fondle. It doesn’t work like that. Aid at extreme need, that’s how the Tuatha de Danaan dole out their miracles.” The priest sighed and dipped his staff toward Lady Mirabelle. “They’ll be calling on you as well, acolyte.”

  “Mages are much less helpful,” the young woman assured him. Her face had just the slightest hint of a smile on it. “Our magics are notoriously bad at healing, and for the rest we have a scale of exorbitant charges. And I am not exactly an acolyte, Kirkgrim Carrionwake.”

  “I think you were,” the priest of Lugh answered slyly, “before you rose to be an adept?”

  “A wizard?” Sigroth growled. Masters of magic and masters of battle rage had old enmities between them.

  “Very perceptive,” Mirabelle admitted. “Yes, I am of the Illuminati. I am fulfilling my last quest to graduate from apprenticeship to mastery in the art, so that I might be granted admission to the higher ranks of the Invisible College.”

  “A mage!” Alfosus of Tarsus muttered. “I thought they never ventured out of their closed universities and secret cloisters these days?”

  “So did I,” complained Sigroth.

  “Well, it makes sense that they have to pop out every now and then to pick up their laundry or buy in lunch,” Kirkgrim pointed out. “Or head from Venice to Byzantium for some reason.”

  “My reasons for traveling are my own,” Mirabelle snapped. The smile was gone now. “I notice you have again diverted the conversation from your own reasons for traveling this route, Wanderer.”

  Kirkgrim chuckled. “Well, they call me Wanderer for a good reason. Mostly I tagged along with Padavan’s caravan because I thought it would be interesting.”

  “No. No, this will be a very ordinary, uneventful voyage,” the Caravan Master assured him in a loud enough voice to carry to those listening at a distance. “Very routine indeed.”

  “Except for the bandits,” pointed out the courier Rhodin. He’d managed to join the group without anyone noticing his arrival.
/>   “Also,” Kirkgrim admitted, cupping his hands round his mouth to make his words to Mirabelle mock-confidential, “there was this great looking girl I liked the look of.”

  “So no good reason to travel with us at all,” the mage summarized coldly.

  “We’ll find out,” the priest replied, with an outrageous wink.

  Sigroth was still catching up. “So he’s a priest of thingie and can make wounds heal up and she’s a mage who can make people fall over. And he wants to get into her…”

  “We should secure the site,” Padavas interrupted hastily. “We’ve repelled the bandits but we don’t know how many more there are. We should check the perimeter again, put out more guard fires, make sure everyone is well after this unfortunate upset. Santar! Get that gate blocked again. Fitz, see where these brigands came from. Try and work out how many there were. Jessup, Wardik, Vare, see what can be done about the burned tents and damaged wagons. Everyone else, if you’ve nothing useful to do, then get some sleep. We move on, an hour past dawn!”

  “This is turning into a night of revelations,” Fitz observed. He leaned over to Fred the truffle pig. “Anything you want to tell me? Secretly a troll?”

  The crowd broke up to return to private business. Kirkgrim hung back. “Perhaps the hidden high mage would care to come and help us with questioning those two bandits she invited to sleep?” suggested the Wanderer.

  ***

  Mirabelle’s magics not only awoke the prisoners, but awoke them in a very tractable mood indeed. “You will tell us why you were attacking this caravan, won’t you?” she asked them.

  The bandits were, in a very literal sense, charmed by the beautiful arcane maiden. “We were told to look for a box,” one of them explained. “We was hired to retrieve it. The rest of the caravan was ours.”

  “Duke Sebastio’s treasury!” Padavas guessed. “I knew it! Do you work for Olderus?”

  “Not the gold chest,” the other prisoner told them helpfully. “This box is a small locked mahogany jewel case, in the care of this lady.”

  Mirabelle looked shocked for a moment, then caught herself. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” she lied, badly.

  “What was the nature of this last graduation quest you mentioned, lady?” Kirkgrim wondered. “It wouldn’t involve the delivery of a small box to some place, would it?”

  “My business is my own!” the mage snapped. She stood up and stormed off back to her wagon.

  “A beautiful adept with a secret treasure,” Rhodin, the Imperial messenger noted. “How interesting.”

  “Greed is a source of evil,” Jastus the monk noted with a sour frown.

  “How many more bandits are there out there?” Fitz asked the prisoners. They looked confused and belligerent until the guide added, “I’m sure the lady would want you to tell me.”

  “There were about two score of us to begin with,” came the answer. “And Rack-man, leading us. And sometimes the fellow what hired us, a posh bearded man with one eye all white. But we lost three men attacking before, and then two died when we encountered the walking dead, and then some more of us in the raid tonight.”

  “Walking dead?” Kirkgrim asked quickly, and for the first time he seemed perturbed by the events around him. “What do you mean, ‘walking dead’?”

  Brother Jastus made a gesture to ward off the evil eye.

  The captive sneered. “We’re not the only ones pacing your caravan. There’s a shambling host of walking corpses out there, growing at each graveyard they find. We made the mistake of getting in their way once, but not again.”

  The beguiled bandits admitted all that they knew, but they could not tell who had hired them, or what other plans he might have, or where their fellow raiders might go next. Nor could they say more about the revenants they had encountered, except that there were many of them and they were following the caravan.

  Nobody slept well for the remainder of the night.

  ***

  Just before dawn there was the clatter of horses as three of the camp guards deserted with what they could carry.

  ***

  “So these walking skellingtons?,” Sigroth asked as they marched along the gray trail the next day, “Is it best to chop them downwards through their skulls, or crossways to take their heads off?”

  Kirkgrim roused himself from the black humor that had fallen upon him since he’d found out about the undead. He allowed himself a little grin at his Viking companion’s single mindedness. “Neck’s best if they’re raised using standard necromancies,” he advised. “The little packet of evil that animates them is usually lodged at the top of the spine. Shatter the backbone and the magics don’t work.”

  “I’ll try and remember,” Sigroth promised. He took a look at the dark scowl on the usually cheerful Wanderer’s face. “You don’t like dead people walking around much, do you?” he recognized.

  “Not specially, no,” Kirkgrim admitted. “I always feel I should do something about it.”

  ***

  “I don’t like it, Fitz,” Padavas admitted to his guide. The Caravan Master and his chief scout looked out over the terrain ahead, where the high ridge path descended down into forested valleys as it wended twenty miles inland from the coast.

  “The ground looks pretty good to me,” Fitz argued. “You’d expect the main road from Byzantium to be reasonable. Some of it even has old Roman paving intact. We’ll make good time on this.”

  “Not the road condition. The rest. I thought by taking the caravan out west of the capital we’d avoid all the trouble we heard about on our usual spice route. That was the whole point of our big triangle journey – find a new passage that was safer than the east has become. But those bandits have been pacing us since Veranus like jackals. And now they’re claiming they’ve seen walking dead men.”

  “They still insist on that story?”

  “Right up to the moment we jerked the wagon away and let them drop,” Padavas reported. He shuddered.

  Fitz had not been around for the execution of the captured highwaymen. He’d made sure he was checking the trail ahead when Santar and his bravos had carried out road justice. “They’d been living wild for a while,” the tracker reported from his examination of their gear and boots. “From more than one band, I reckon. I think their one-eyed boss has been picking up local talent as he went, to have enough thugs to try for a caravan the size of this one.”

  “Well he miscalculated there, didn’t he? We sent those brigands packing, except for the ones we set swinging or left for dogmeat.”

  Fred the truffle pig recognized the word dogmeat and snuffled around hopefully.

  “That’s the thing, boss,” Fitz admitted. “If it had gone just a bit differently last night we’d have been in real trouble. If that big Viking fellow hadn’t set himself in the gateway and scared the hell out of the invaders, if that laughing Wanderer-priest hadn’t doused the fires amongst the wagons, and if that mage-girl hadn’t done whatever she did to drop the men who assaulted her, it would have been much, much worse. Those three turned the encounter for us. Without that we’d have suffered serious casualties.”

  Padavas sighed. “What of them, Fitz? I can understand the Viking – Sigroth is it? He’s plain as day, impossible to miss. A mercenary far from home, working hand-to-mouth to meet his simple needs. Not the sharpest thinker but hell in a fight. And a cheery soul with a flagon in one hand and a drumstick in the other. A good hire, I reckon. But the other two? A gods-touched priest and a candidate for the Invisible College?”

  “You’ve carried priests and mages before, Padavas.”

  “And seldom come out of it well, Fitz. Wizards tend to have their own problems, and they don’t usually mind too much if ordinary folk suffer for them. Those bandits claim to be looking for a jewel box that it looks like the lady’s carrying.”

  “She paid for passage with us. We have to protect her and her goods.”

  “And then there’s Kirkgrim. What do you know about the
se northern gods of his?”

  “Not a lot. A pantheon like the Olympians or that warlike bunch the Vikings follow. I don’t think they do anything worse than the usual religions. Burn criminals in wicker men, maybe, if what Caesar wrote in his memoirs was true. Big on druids and dolmens.” Fitz looked wistful. “I’ve always wanted to visit Albion, the isle of mysteries.” He scratched Fred’s ears.

  “Any idea who’s out there following us now?” Padavas asked his best tracker. “No walking dead men, I hope.”

  “Not that I’ve discovered. I can hang back a bit and keep watch if you want, but then I won’t be on the trail ahead.”

  “The train is nervous,” the Caravan Master worried. “Those three guards running off with provisions hasn’t helped. Santar wants to crucify them.”

  “If I were you, boss, I’d be glad of a miracle worker, a red Viking, and a beautiful and mysterious sorceress on the journey. If nothing else it gives people something to gossip about.”

  The lead wagon caught up with Fitz and Padavas, so Caravan Master and scout parted then. The train continued its slow descent into the Agrianes River valley.

  ***

  “Lady Mirabelle?”

  The mage turned on the box seat where she’d been taking a turn steering the draft horses that pulled her hired wagon. She saw that the imperial courier Rhodin had ridden his steed alongside to address her.

  “Yes,” she enquired cautiously.

  “I am Margrave Rhodin dy Thermi, commissioned to Duke Sebastio’s Imperial Courier Corps. Might I know your full name and rank, my lady?”

  “I’m Mirabelle de Castile, Silver Adept Initiate of the Invisible College’s Venetian incarnation, under the tutorship of Lady Merill de Famagusta. I have my Imperial license papers in my trunk if you require them.”

  “Oh, no, lady. I wasn’t questioning your legitimacy as a thaumaturge. I was merely trying – in my own clumsy way – to establish whether you were visiting the Invisible College at Byzantium, and whether you would be amenable to any commissions while you stayed in our capital.”