When the Saints

CHAPTER 18

Wulf went back to the Blue Room. It was cold and almost dark, because it was on an outside wall lit by only a narrow, unglazed loophole. Many hours had passed since he ate Justina’s strange fish soup, but he was too weary to go in search of food.

Anton and Otto still lingered on the barbican roof. They must be really worried about Vlad’s sortie, wondering what was keeping it. Vlad himself… His men had caught their fleeing Wend and were bringing him in, not gently. There was a lot of guttural shouting in several languages.

Curiosity jabbed Wulf and told him he couldn’t possibly go to bed before he discovered what was going on up there in the gorge. Conscience retorted that to materialize in the middle of a group of workaday men-at-arms would violate the first commandment. But wait… when Wulf himself had returned from Long Valley a few hours ago, he and Copper had not emerged exactly where he had aimed, but nearby. Somehow his Voices protected him from accidentally exposing his powers.

He opened a peephole through limbo some distance away from Vlad and his men, back along the track they had cleared. They all seemed to be engrossed in the prisoner; the light was bad, and the piles of tumbled deadfall were almost head high. Confident that his arrival would be unseen, Wulf enlarged the gap, stepped through, and began picking his way between the heaps of wreckage to join the conference. Soon he was noticed, but attracted no special interest. If the count had sent his squire to check up on them, that was not their concern.

The prisoner, who was being addressed as Lech, was a grubby, heavyset bear of a man. He looked unprepossessing and none too smart. He was far from happy, but everyone else was grinning and chuckling, so the news must be good. Vlad was firing questions, one of the men-at-arms was translating them, and the prisoner’s answers were making the same laborious journey back. By the time Wulf was close enough to make out what was being said, Lech’s presence there was being explained. He was a carter, and he had been at the mouth of the gorge when “the wind came.”

“Says he was sent back to get the oxen, sir. He’s to unyoke them and try to drive them back to the bivouac.”

“He’ll never get them through this muck,” Vlad growled. “Who owns them?”

The question was translated and answered, the answer translated: “He thinks Duke Wartislaw does, sir. He says they’re not his.”

“He’s even more of a fool than he looks. If he’d said they were his I might have let him keep them. Tell him we’re taking him and all that steak back to Gallant.” Vlad glanced around. “We can’t do more here than get ourselves killed. Let’s-” He jumped, rattling his armor, as he discovered Wulf at his elbow. “Where in flames did you come from?”

“Came to see what was keeping you,” Wulf said cheerily. “What’s up?”

“Much what we thought. Back home, everyone. No fight tonight. Go and make your wives happy. And tell Sir Teodor to turn his troop around.” He waved for his men to leave without him. “Come and look at this.” He led Wulf in the opposite direction. “See the trees?”

“Er… no.” Against the last traces of daylight in the western sky, there were no trees. The steep hillsides had been stripped bare. The trees were down here, in the gorge. In pieces. Wulf had only a rough grasp of the lay of the land, but he was sure the wagon he had fired had been at the far end of the gorge, two or three miles from here. The blast couldn’t have stripped hills that far away, surely?

But he couldn’t ask Vlad, because the big man was plowing through the branches and debris, evidently returning to some particular place. He was big and clad in steel, heaving debris out of his way like some great impatient bear. Even following in his tracks, Wulf could not go as fast. When Vlad stopped, he had to wait for him to catch up. “Can you hear the waterfall?”

Wulf listened. He heard a million syncopated dripping noises, nothing more… Possibly voices a long way off. “No.”

“Thunder Falls. Should be right here, Jachym says, and the others agree. The river’s not running.”

“That’s ridiculous! What can stop a river running?”

“You can. Look down here.” What he had brought Wulf to see was under deadfall, almost invisible in the gloom.

Wulf squatted down, then stood up hastily. “Bodies!”

“About three of them, we thought. That’s if you put them back together, they’d make three or a bit more. A horse and a half on top of them, roughly, and then trees on top of that.”

“No!” Wulf said, appalled. “The explosion couldn’t have done this! The powder wagons were miles away.” This was destruction on a scale he could barely imagine. Men torn to pieces?

“The explosion rattled Castle Gallant!” Vlad said with a chuckle. c0em201C; But you’re right. The gunpowder went up very close to their camp, the man says. Lech is his name, Polish. The blast did terrible slaughter, he thinks, but all he truly knows is what happened here. One or two men have gotten across, but there’s still about a thousand men bivouacking on this side tonight, so let’s you and me just creep quietly away and not provoke any nasty reprisals.”

He started to move. Wulf grabbed his steel-plated arm. “This side of what?”

Vlad chuckled. “Of the avalanche. The blast you set off shook the mountains and started an avalanche. The valley’s totally blocked with snow above the falls. A couple of hundred feet high, Lech said, but we caught a glimpse of it and I think he may be short a bit. Who knows? Avalanches start terrible winds, laddie, and this one came crashing down into the gorge. Its wind smashed everything on this side and probably on the other side, too. The debris has dammed the Ruzena.”

It had surely damned Wulfgang Magnus. “Then the lake will rise? And…”

“Not much, we decided. It’s a big lake, the men tell me. But the low point is where the river drains out, so the area just beyond the snow pile is going to fill up. The gorge will become a smaller lake, until the snow melts next summer. If the Dragon isn’t under the snow, or gone over the cliff, it’s going to be underwater, and when the dam breaks it may even get swept away. Don’t make no difference now.”

“We won?” Wulf said, unable to comprehend the scale of this disaster.

Vlad gave him a buffet on the shoulder that almost knocked him over. Luckily the giant was wearing leather gloves, not gauntlets.

“ It was you who won, sonny! Duke Wartislaw is either dead or beaten. Wulfgang Magnus, you are the greatest of us all. I couldn’t believe you were going to do what you said you would do with that bed warmer. You’ve got more stomach than a herd of cows. Maybe you were just ignorant and lucky, but that’s true of lots of heroes. You single-handedly stopped thirty thousand men and lifted the siege of Castle Gallant. I’m so proud of you I want to scream your fame to the skies, and I know I mustn’t do that. I tell you, Father would have wept with pride.”

Just a few days ago, Wulf would have burst his heart to earn such words from Vlad. Now they made him feel ill. He was doing the devil’s work.