The New Magic

RIDERS

RIDERS

“Tell me who you ride beside, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

– Falconsrealm proverb

Atop a burly black riding horse, tall and rangy in his green cape and dark woolen tunics, a black woolen watchcap tight to his head, Sir Saril of Red Thistle’s face was bright and boyish except for hard slate eyes and a sharp jaw that ground in thought.

Sir Saril looked down upon the settlement of Grach far below, the furthest-flung inhabited corner of the Wild River Reach. The jagged peaks of The Reach, savagely high and sharp, rose against a sky of tarnished silver behind him.

He clicked his teeth together.

Far below the village, pewter breakers smashed at high cliffs, ponderous, blowing spray at a distant tower. The immense pause between rolling impacts betrayed the size of the surf; the waves would have inundated some castles.

The town of Grach was small. Saril counted twenty buildings. It wasn’t so much a village as it was a farming and hunting cooperative—maybe a dozen families.

Red Thistle, his home, was such a place. Saril had been born into a town of five families; forty souls. And now, only a few years after leaving home, he was a knight in the King’s Order of the Stallion, recently made second and Lord’s Chancellor to Sir Jarrod the Merciful, Chief Lieutenant in the Order of the Stallion, Lord Protector of Falconsrealm and Lord of Wild River Reach.

He’d never been home again.

Sir Bevio, as young but rounder and broader and red-bearded, and with a heavy dark cloak pulled tight against the weather, came up behind. His mount, black like Saril’s, led a smaller brown horse loaded with weapons, roundshields, and heavy bags shadowed with damp.

Bevio pulled his cloak tighter as the wind snapped its teeth at them.

“No fires,” said Saril after a long time watching. “There’s no smoke. We’re freezing our asses off, and nobody down there has a fire going.”

“Maybe their wood’s well-seasoned,” Bevio offered.

“We’d smell it. The wind’s off the sea. That chill comes all the way from Ice Isle.”

Bevio unwrapped a hunk of wine-colored cheese, took out a small knife, and offered a slice to Saril. They ate and stared at the village for a while. Nothing moved except the sound of the sea, its measured breathing like a man exhausted and at peace.

The wind screamed at them from time to time, but it brought no sounds of daily life from the valley.

“I hate this,” Saril decided. “I hate everything about this, right now.”

“So do I,” Bevio agreed. “We have to go down there.”

Saril watched the sea for a little while longer. It was a violent, unsecure, remote place, the edge of the world. Not a good place.

Not a good place at all.

“Armor up,” he decided.

Outside the gate—what was left of it—the skies had darkened to slate with gangrenous eddies. The rain was close, the air tinged with the bite of snow.

Saril waved Bevio to a stop.

He’d never been to Grach, but he knew that the other towns in The Reach didn’t have gate towers, or even walls. Grach, however, had been fortified. And, from the looks of it, hastily so.

The walls of the town had been cobbled together with squares of earth cut from a wide and deep trench on each side and augmented with sharp sticks at the top of the wall. It was enough to slow an attacker, but not stop one.

The towers, two men high, were also made of packed earth with simple stone battlements.

And they were empty. Many of the sticks had been trampled. The gate, made of lashed boughs, had been smashed; the ends, and the largest standing poles, chipped and gnawed by axes.

Bevio’s voice echoed from behind a curtain of mail that draped from his helmet’s spectacles. “What the hell happened here?”

Saril’s voice was equally muffled from within a matching helmet. “Why didn’t they send for reinforcements? If they had time to build this, they’d have had time to send a rider.”

“Be careful,” said Bevio. “There’s old magic all through these mountains.”

“This is not magic.”

“No?” asked Bevio. He set his shield, a plain wooden roundshield rubbed dark with years of oil, on his thigh as Saril rode ahead and motioned at him to stay put.

Nothing moved inside the town. Saril could see the outlines of slain dogs and horses in the rain. A flock of birds flew up from the center yard.

Saril looked at it for a long time, one hand on his swordhilt. He rode back and forth from left to right, looking through the remains of the gate at the town, then reined his horse completely around and trotted it back to Bevio.

“Are we going in?” asked Bevio.

“There’s not enough whisky in the world to make that seem like a good idea to me.”

Bevio shrugged and patted his horse. “My horse isn’t scared.”

Saril sighed. “We just spent an entire morning getting his head out of a log.”

Bevio shrugged again. “There was an apple in there.”

“I’m not trusting your damned horse. Or mine. And I’m not going in there. Let’s go check the tower.”

The veil of rain whipped over them and they kicked their mounts into a trot.

Maceshadow’s Tower had once been the refuge of Vanan the Marauder.

Legend held that Vanan had been a wizard powerful enough to calm the seas off this tower. He had then used the bay as a launching point for a fleet of magical raiding ships whose sailors always found calm waters around them, and as such, stomped the hell out of anyone living along the water for five hundred miles in any direction, until Vanan essentially owned most of the Gateskeep coastline.

The story went on that an enterprising knight named Sir Mathac Maceshadow managed to kill Vanan. This lifted the spells on the ships, which the seas then smashed to slivers against the cliff walls.

It seemed like a lot of work for such a place. Maceshadow’s Tower was square, not terrifically tall, and battered to pieces by the world around it, with spiderwebs of dead ivy along the sea-facing wall, which enclosed a courtyard with a three-story manor house and some gabled areas for the daily goings-on that kept a small tower running.

Stubby saltgrass grew in clumps from the wall to the sea. A single-horse trail led back to Grach through a skeletal forest, the trees scattered and leafless.

Saril figured, seeing it now, that Vanan hadn’t really been that great of a marauder after all. From the stories, he’d expected this place to be magnificent.

The rain hammered sideways off the ocean. The surf was deafening as it shovelhooked the cliffs in long swells a hundred yards from them and not far below, the tide near its highest for the season.

The gate was closed. The windows in the tower, and the windows in the manor that they could see, were completely black. Nothing moved. Nothing glowed.

Saril yelled again at the guardpost; no response.

“They had to see us coming,” said Bevio. “There’s nobody here!”

Saril kicked his horse and disappeared around the wall. It was a small compound and he came from the far side some time later.

“Nothing!” he said, riding up to Bevio. “We’re leaving!”