King and Emperor

There they were indeed, not twenty feet away, edging along the narrow awkward path, too busy avoiding thorns to look around them. Shef caught a low grumble of conversation, an angry bark of command from the man in the lead. The grumbling did not stop. Low-grade troops, Shef thought. Local levies like his own county fyrds. Reluctant to take trouble, thoughts simply on getting home. Easy to avoid, as long as one did not actually fall over them in the dark. It was the silent men who did not move who were the danger.

Back to the path, another half-mile on, then into the scrub and once more the steady crawling round some obstacle or sentry-post. Another hundred yards on a goat-path, and crawl again. On and on. Shef lost sense of direction, ceased fatalistically to glance at the sky and reckon the time. The gasping of Richier diminished as he too seemed to settle to their uneven rhythm of movement. And then suddenly, they were at a halt, all seven of them in a clump, looking from the shadows across a patch of bare ground at glimmering fires. Behind them the great jagged mass of the peak, the Castle of the Graduale, Puigpunyent itself.

Straw pointed very gently at the fires. “Them,” he breathed. “Last men. Last ring. Los alemanos.”

Germans they were. Shef could see the iron glinting as they moved on their beats, shields and mail, helmets and gauntlets. In any case he would have recognized the bearing of the Lanzenbruder, whom he had seen swarming to the assault in the battle of the Braethraborg years before. Then they had been on his side. Now… There was no chance of creeping past them. They had cut down the scrub to make a bare belt, woven the debris into a rough thorn fence. The sentries were not fifty yards apart, and they moved continually. They were watching, too, not like the discontented levies further out.

Suddenly, from the bulk of Puigpunyent, there came a great crash and a thunder of rock. Shef started, noticed the sentries looking too, then turning back to their duties. A cloud of dust rose barely visible against the black and Shef could hear faint shouting. The Emperor's gangs were working on through the night, in shifts, tearing down the whole mountainside with pick and lever and crane, to rip out the heart of the heretics' faith. To find the Emperor his relic.

Shef looked again at the sky, the position of the moon, still some way off full. It was midnight now. But it would take time, he knew, time to rig the kites and winch them out. Maybe they would have to wait for a wind, even up there on the mountain. Straw was pulling at him again, anxious and wanting an instant answer. He was only a boy. In war, everything took longer than you wanted, except when the other side did it. Shef looked round, motioned them all to the ground. If there was nothing else to do, rest. If his plan succeeded, he would know soon enough.

Stretched out underneath the bushes, Shef put his head down on his forearms, felt the weariness come over him. There was no risk where they were, and the boys would stay awake. He let his eyelids close, fell slowly into the pit of sleep.

“He's not just loose now, he's out,” said the voice, the familiar voice, his father's voice. “Out in the open.”

Even in his dream Shef felt a surge of resentment, disbelief. “You're not there,” he told himself, himself talking to himself. “Svandis explained all that. You're just a part of my mind, the same way all the gods are part of people's minds.”

“All right, all right,” the voice went on with weary tolerance. “Believe what you like. Believe what your girlfriend likes. But believe this. He's out. I have no hold over him. Things could go any way now. Ragnarok— that's what Othin wants, what Loki wants. What they think they want.”

“You don't want it?”

“I don't want what would come after it. Church all-powerful, Way all-powerful, whichever. There's a better way—back to where we were before, before Sheaf became Shield. Maybe with something added, something new.”

“What's that?”

“You're going to see. You're going to show them. The priests have it inside their holy circle, but they see it only as a warning, not a blessing. Can be either.”

Shef had lost the thread, could not follow the hints. “What are you talking about?”

“What Loki lost to. What you are bringing back for him. His namesake, his near namesake. Logi.”

“Fire,” Shef translated automatically.

“Fire it is. Wake and see what you are bringing to the world.”

Shef's head snapped upright, his eyes instantly wide open. He realized that he had already been half-woken by a rising babble of voices, from the ring of sentries in front of him. But all over the guarded plain were coming shouts and calls, the blast of a trumpet as some panicker decided to alert his men to what they had seen already. Fire drifting down out of the sky. After a few seconds Shef's eye and mind adjusted to what he was seeing. Immediately before him, a white flare drifting down, as brilliant as a sun, throwing flickering shadows over the thorn below. Above it, a green one. Not far away, Shef could see a third and a fourth beginning to drift down, thought for a second he could even see the tiny glow of the slow-match. But any such light was killed instantly by the lurid colors spreading across the sky. Violet, yellow, red. More and more flares seemed to spring into life every moment, though Shef knew that could not be so. It was just that each one took moments for the mind to recognize it. By the time it had been taken in, there were others in being to focus on. All three kites must be aloft and working. The boy-flyers were doing their duty better than he could have believed.

To the troops on the ground, local levies, bishops' men, half-heretics and Lanzenbruder alike, every man deeply superstitious and steeped from birth in a culture of demons and miracles, dragons and portents, the flares in the sky were even harder to take in. Men do not see what they see. They see the nearest fit between what they see and what they expect. All across the plain beneath the rock of Puigpunyent, cries rose up as men tried to fit a meaning to something that defied all experience.

“A comet! The tailed star! God's judgment on those who overthrew the long-haired kings,” wailed a chaplain, starting an instant panic.

“Dragons in the sky,” shouted a Lanzenritter from the Drachenberg country, where belief in dragons was ingrained. “Shoot for its soft spot! Shoot before the damned things get on the ground!” A rain of arrows poured into the air from those who heard him, relieved at hearing an order of any kind. The arrows landed among the horses of a cavalry unit corralled two hundred yards off, starting a stampede.

“It is Judgment Day and the dead rising to meet their God in the sky,” lamented a bishop with much on his conscience which he had hoped to do timely penance for. His cry would have carried little conviction, since the lights were falling rather than rising, if falling more slowly than could possibly be natural. But as he called out some sharp-sighted man caught the vague shape of one of the gliding kites banking above the light it had just released, and shrieked hysterically, “Wings! I can see their wings! They are the angels of the Lord come to scourge sinners!”

Within moments a roar spread across the plain, of ten thousand men shouting their explanations. The cowboys of the Camargue, lightest of cavalry, reacted first, were in their saddles in moments and heading purposefully for safety. Panicked sentries abandoned their positions in the brush and began to draw together, hoping for comfort in numbers. As they saw the infection spreading, the disciplined Germans of the Lanzenorden, scattered here and there to officer and stiffen the more doubtful Frankish troops, began to seize the runners, knock men down with their lance-butts, try to drive them back to their posts.

Spying from the cover of the thorns, Shef watched intently for an opportunity. One thing he had forgotten. While the men down there, the inner ring of the Emperor's guard, had certainly been distracted—they were clumped together now, abandoning their set watch-pattern, pointing into the sky—the flares themselves were making the whole landscape almost as bright as day. If he tried to move forward now, across the bare strip that the guards had made, they would certainly see him. If not as he moved forward, then in the seconds it would take to force a way through the barricade of cut-down trees. He needed cover to reach that point. Then the time to cut a way through, and to crawl a hundred yards through the masking scrub on the other side. Then they would be on the edge of one