The cuckoo, p.1
The Cuckoo, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Leo Carew
Excerpt from The Justice of Kings copyright © 2022 by Richard Swan
Cover design by Patrick Insole
Cover illustration by Larry Rostant
Maps by Tim Peters
Author photograph by Leo Carew
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First U.S. Edition: December 2022
Originally published in Great Britain by Wildfire in September 2022
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943849
ISBNs: 9780316430548 (trade paperback), 9780316430524 (ebook)
E3-20221018-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map of Albion
Prologue
Part I—Roper 1 The Wounded Giant
2 The Warning
3 The Embalming
4 What Is Coming
5 The Barrel and Nails
6 Uprising
7 Brother
8 The Statue
9 Built from Bones
10 Submission
11 The Barleymen
12 The Outlaws
13 Arrival
14 The Old Tongue
15 The Riot
16 Grendel
17 Talva Radburnsdottir
18 Keturah’s Army
19 Frathi’s Case
20 Rangalist
21 The Wall
22 Keturah’s Case
23 The Cliffs
24 Possession
25 The Queen of Albion
Part II—Keturah 26 The Crossing
27 The Giant and the Fool
28 Gravedogs
29 Sakeus
30 Lord Ruden
31 The Thing in the Barrel
32 The Wagon
33 The Darkness
34 The Assassin
35 The Dead Legion
36 Roper’s Toe
37 The Favour
38 Myrklettur
39 Cold Voice
40 The Tomb
41 Why?
42 The Crossroads
Part III—Bellamus 43 The Cell
44 The Captain
45 Name Him
46 The Queen Is Dead
47 The Thirteenth Man
48 Roper’s Tale
49 Burn the Boats
50 The Messenger
51 The Abbio
52 Identity
53 The First Day
54 Aredamra
55 The Cannon
56 The Pass Beneath the Cliffs
57 Zephyr
58 The Silver Wolf
59 The Second Day
60 With Me
61 Gogmagoc
62 Across the Sea
63 The Third Day
64 Framskular
Epilogue
Roll of Black Legions
Houses and Major Characters of the Black Kingdom
Acknowledgements
Discover More
Extras Meet the Author
A Preview of The Justice of Kings
Also by Leo Carew
For Al, for Soph, and for Ragnar
No surrender
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Prologue
Pain.
It riddled Vigtyr like woodworm. His foot had been lanced through, and agony swept up his leg each time he shifted onto it. The wound at his chest gaped like a salamander’s mouth whenever he spread his arms. The roots of his teeth burned cold as each breath ran over them, and his eye—whatever was left of his blind, flattened eye—throbbed with each heartbeat.
The man who had done this to him was dead, Vigtyr was sure. He had seen him die; he had struck every blow it had taken to put him down. Limping, spitting and sobbing, he had dragged his body to the camp perimeter and abandoned him there. But it still felt as though he was close: listening for Vigtyr’s cries, just behind the canvas of his tent. The dark interior was hot, and filled with Vigtyr’s own thoughts, circling him like dogs. He fumbled at the toggles to the entrance and staggered into the night.
A buttercup-yellow moon shone overhead, and to his left, the city of Lundenceaster still burned orange behind its high walls, like a vast cauldron of coals. Campfires flickered around his tent, battered legionaries huddled around them, most of them awake and talking softly.
Vigtyr needed distraction: anything to take him out of his own head. He bent to seal his tent, trying to think what he might do. And a distraction arrived.
From the dark came the sound of hooves and the clink of a harness. He straightened, and turned to see a black horseman riding by. The rider was powerful and straight-backed, but the horse beneath him looked beaten. Even as Vigtyr watched, the beast nearly stumbled to its knees, recovering at the last instant. Legs trembling, it lifted itself once again, and as it did, there was a moment when the rider’s face was illuminated by a campfire.
On instinct, Vigtyr retreated into the shadow cast by his tent. “No,” he hissed, as the rider’s face: grim, robust, and instantly recognisable, slid back into shadow. He knew that man, and the sight of him sent one deduction after another tumbling into place. “No!”
The man on the horse was Leon Kaldison: a Sacred Guardsman, and a terror. He had been at the haskoli—the mountain school—guarding Lord Roper’s surviving brother from an assassin sent by Vigtyr. If Leon was here, it could only be because that task was now unnecessary.
There might be two reasons for that. The first was that the brother was now dead, and so had no need of protection. But that was not it. A man did not flog his mount to exhaustion to deliver bad news to his lord; to announce that he had failed, and the Black Lord’s brother had been murdered. But he might if the assassin had been foiled. If he had been caught, interrogated, and given up Vigtyr’s name as the traitor working against the Anakim.
Leon had paused to ask directions from the men gathered about the campfire. One of them raised a hand, pointing the guardsman towards Lord Roper’s hearth.
Vigtyr swore. He hesitated one moment more, then turned and fled into the night.
An agonised limp was the best he could manage, and while he limped, he thought. If he tried to leave camp, he would be noted by a sentry. When the search began with torches and horses and knives, the sentry would point them exactly in his direction. Some of the Skiritai—the army’s rangers—could scent like dogs. They could track in the dark: picking up the most infinitesimal clues by torchlight. He would be dragged from whatever pitiful hiding place he had found, and given over to the monsters of the Kryptea.
The thought was enough to bring Vigtyr to a halt, and he cast about wildly. The camp was huge and the blackness profound. His only chance was to hide here somewhere. With luck, they might assume he had slipped past the perimeter and not search too long within its boundary.
He began to limp once more, veering left and keeping to the corridors of darkness between each hearth. He had no more than moments before this camp erupted, and hissed with each agonising step, limping faster and faster for the northern field hospital. “Please,” he breathed, passing into the void between the campfires and the hospital. He could hear the faint wailing of the hospital’s injured. “Please, please, please.”
Then came a roar which made Vigtyr flinch: unmistakably his own name, bellowed into the night: “Vigtyr!” It rang across the camp, a howl of such distorted rage that the voice was unrecognisable. It might have been any one of those who had been close to Pryce, or perhaps Leon, that remorseless hound, even now sniffing him out.
“No,” he gasped. “No, no, no.”
The shouts behind him were getting louder, and the campsite began to stir. News was spreading that Vigtyr was a spy and a traitor, and that thousands of this army lay dead because of what he had done. There was an ugliness in the aftermath of that assault, and all the fury and venom of fifty thousand men would be turned on Vigtyr.
But for now they were behind him, and Vigtyr was nearing the low, dark mound he had been ai ming for.
Bodies. Hundreds of them, unsuccessfully treated in the hospital and piled here to await burial. Before he had even reached the mound, Vigtyr was unbuckling his belt and pulling his tunic over his head. He tossed it aside, stripping not just his clothes, but tearing dressings and bandages off his wounds as well. He must resemble every other corpse on this pile. His half-dozen injuries would be his camouflage, as would the overpowering stench rising from the dead. He fumbled at his boots, tugging them off with a puff of the dried grass he had used as socks. He hurled them aside before realising he had left his sword in his tent. He hesitated, but the shouts at his back were getting closer, and there was no time to find a replacement.
Vigtyr cast one look over his shoulder, and wished he had not. Torches were streaming into the dark, spreading out across the plains and searching the night.
He looked away, swearing under his breath as he took a handful of dirt and rubbed it into the wounds at his foot, chest, neck and eye, so that the fresh blood would look old and congealed. Then he climbed onto the mound of bodies, staggering across the uneven surface to its centre.
It stank. He held back a retch, looking back the way he had come to see his clothes scattered on the ground beyond the mound, in what may as well have been a declaration of his presence. “No, no, no, no, no!” He scrambled back onto the grass, eyes on the torches bobbing nearer and nearer. He thrust the garments beneath a body, before staggering back onto the mound. He dragged one cold, stiff corpse across his legs and then lay down, pulling another body over his torso. He tried to move a lower leg that was nearby so that it covered his face, but it was stiff, and each time just drifted back to its original resting place.
He was panting much too hard, and would be detected the instant the legionaries arrived. He tried to slow his breathing, but found the force of it overwhelming. Gasping, heart thundering, he stared up at the sickly yellow moon, the noises of pursuit growing.
A gang of legionaries was approaching the mound, in loud discussion which ceased abruptly when they reached his hiding place. Vigtyr heard a noise of disgust, then a voice spoke. “Surely even he wouldn’t stoop to this.” There came a few heartbeats of wild hacking, before another voice interrupted.
“Don’t,” it said. “Leave these poor bastards to their rest. The prick is long out of here.”
“We should at least check.”
“Check, then. But no need to mutilate them.”
There came the sounds of several men climbing unevenly onto the mound. Vigtyr kept his eyes open, like most of the other corpses, and tried again to hold his breath. He was trembling faintly, and there seemed nothing he could do to stop it. The legionaries prowled across the bodies, Vigtyr catching sight of a torch above him as one of them came near. It quivered in the corner of his vision, and then swept away.
Two more torches appeared, illuminating their bearers’ intent faces, scouring the bodies. They were nearly on top of him, bending down and pulling some of the corpses roughly aside. A wave of pain pulsed up Vigtyr’s leg as one of the legionaries trod on his injured foot, forcing it into an extension. He heard the tiniest breath escape his throat, but that, and the brief spasm that crossed his face, were missed in the darkness.
“Let’s go,” came the voice again. “He’ll be out past the perimeter.”
The legionaries gave the bodies one last glance, one of them looking right over Vigtyr. But he was looking for the man he remembered from tournaments, subject of scandalous gossip, and thrilling sightings in the street and the mess: Vigtyr the Quick. Vigtyr the Whole. He was not looking for a man with a ruined eye, or an empty, toothless mouth, or a flapping wound in his neck. Vigtyr looked as dead as any of the others, and the legionaries turned away, clambering off the bodies and leaving him alone on the mound.
The voices were retreating, and Vigtyr’s thoughts turned to escape. But it seemed impossible. Even if he could make it past the perimeter sentries, he could not think how to cover his trail well enough that the Skiritai would not overhaul him.
He waited there, naked and shivering, for hours. No ideas came to him, grey light tinged the east, and with it came a sense of dread. Dawn was near, and he still had no plan. He ignored the dread for a time, but as the light grew, that became impossible.
Horror clutched him. He had to move. He should run, or perhaps burrow deep into the corpses, and cower inside the mound. Anything but lie here, skin crawling, among bodies who had died because of him. The corpses on top were suffocating and he stirred, half sitting up, fighting his way clear of his cover and no longer caring if he were caught, because he could not stay here.
Then he heard a low growl.
Vigtyr froze, profound footsteps filling the dark. Something was moving towards him. He realised what was happening and very slowly, sank back onto the bodies. The Black Lord must have recruited the Unhieru to the search. The giants were prowling the camp, doing whatever they did to elicit the feeling of awful panic they commanded, and clearly hoping it would flush Vigtyr into the open.
He knew he must not move, but the terror was nearly past endurance, and the beast was thudding closer. The feeling was so visceral that it made his rational decision to stay put seem terribly feeble. It was dread potent enough to kill, drowning the distant whisper in his head that insisted this must pass. Hold on, said the voice, buffeted by a wordless swirl of panic. This will pass, hold on. It will move away, just stay here.
Words, decisions, thoughts: flimsy things beside the horror making his flesh crawl.
But the dread was fading. The Unhieru was moving past, taking with it that terrible aura. It was not long, just another minute, before it was gone. Vigtyr found he was drenched in cold sweat and trembling violently. He leaned aside and retched as quietly as he could, curling into a knot and closing his eyes.
The night seemed quieter, most of the voices more distant than they had been, and it was nearly dawn. Vigtyr rolled onto his stomach and began to crawl for the edge of the mound, casting about for legionaries. The grass seemed deserted, and he retrieved his clothes, dressed quickly and began to limp for the perimeter. Perhaps there would be somewhere he could slip past.
He spotted a distant party of legionaries, clutching torches and evidently still searching for him, and he swerved away, putting the dawn at his back and heading north-west. This brought him to the line of pickets, standing by braziers and guarding the perimeter of the camp.
They had been tripled. Each brazier burned high, casting long shadows on the ground, the silhouetted figures stirring restlessly. There was no chance of slipping past.
Vigtyr ground to a halt. It was as though the warren in which he was sheltering had just had a ferret fed into the entrance, even now snuffling through the tunnels towards him. He was standing in the middle of a singed wheat-field, and but for the dawn-touched darkness, would be completely exposed.
Nearby was a cluster of trees. It was small, and offered no corridor out of the camp, but the foliage was thick, and hunters seldom thought to look above the ground. He might be able to conceal himself among the branches, and limped towards its cover. Nearest was a high oak, with a hollow above his head that would suffice as a handhold. He latched onto it and pulled, grunting at the pain in his chest, boots scrabbling at the bark until he could snatch out at the lowest branch. That hurt even more, but he caught it and held on, waiting for the agony to subside.
Then a hand seized his ankle.
Vigtyr cried out in shock as he was yanked from his two handholds, crumpling to a heap beside the oak trunk. Pain swept up his leg and he opened his mouth to scream. But the breath died as he felt sharp metal pressed against his neck, and a cold voice hissed in his ear: “You didn’t think everyone looking for you carried torches, did you?” There was soft laughter, three or four voices nearby. “No noise, now,” warned the cold voice. “Or I’ll open your guts here and now.”
Vigtyr was dragged upright, his hands forced behind his back and bound roughly. He could not resist a groan of pain as the wound at his chest separated again. A rough fist seized his hair and tugged his head backwards. “Did you not hear what I said? No noise. Save it for when you kneel before our master.”
Vigtyr could not kneel before Roper. He thought wildly of escape, but it was impossible. Even if he could somehow break free of these men, he was too injured to outrun them.
