The Black Shield (The Red Sword Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Black Shield

  The Red Sword Trilogy #2

  by Michael Wallace

  Copyright ©2017 Michael Wallace

  Balsalom Publishing

  Cover art by Miguel Coimbra

  Chapter One

  Early spring, four months before the slaying of Bronwyn of Arvada on the king’s highway.

  The paladins were two miles east of the village of Gronhelm when Sir Wolfram spotted the dead animal in the road. Or rather, his horse did. Wolfram was riding next to his sister at the head of the company, and had been squinting at the sky so intently that it was a surprise when his mare pulled up, shaking her head and balking.

  The villagers had warned of griffin riders in the hill country, and so the paladins had kept their focus on the sky, eyes drawn to every crow, hawk, and eagle. They had nervously cleared their throats and eyed each other whenever the wind shifted and the slate-colored clouds began to drift lower. Perfect cover for griffins.

  “Well,” Bronwyn said as she and Wolfram eyed the dead animal. “That isn’t a good sign.”

  There was so much blood and carnage that it took a moment to identify the carcass as belonging to a horse, and not a cow, goat, or sheep. Its throat was torn open, and its innards lay in a sloppy mess outside its belly. Blood had drained out and collected at the bottom of cart ruts, where it had yet to congeal, and there were few flies. No crows or other scavengers, either. The kill was fresh.

  A saddle lay to one side, the leather bloody and shredded, and Wolfram eyed the scrub country surrounding the road. No sign of the unhorsed rider. A glance overhead. No circling griffins, either, thankfully.

  Bronwyn motioned for the others to hold position behind her. “Crossbows,” she told them. “If it’s a lone beast, you fire your bolts and drive it off. If it has a rider, let him see your arms, but do not fire at him or his mount.”

  “And if we’re attacked anyway?” Wolfram asked. “Do we fight to kill or to drive them off?”

  “These griffin riders are brave enough, but they’re not suicidal. A lone rider won’t attack a company of twenty armed paladins.”

  “It’s not the lone griffin that worries me,” he told her. “The Gronhelmers said the griffins have been attacking eight or ten at a time—slaughtering entire flocks of sheep.”

  “We’re not sheep, Brother.”

  “They’ve killed people, too.”

  “Herders and farmers, the lot of them. Anyway, they might be exaggerating.”

  The road was already rising toward the mountain passes, and Wolfram looked east, to the snow-covered peaks of the Dragon’s Spine. Three years had passed since the first griffins were spotted flying over the hill country of Eastern Eriscoba, and now the mountains were infested with them.

  Whatever had driven them from their homelands had also brought wolves—starving packs from the northern mountains—followed by giants and other strange beasts. And it wasn’t only the icy wastes of the north that were in upheaval. Packs of gray marauders came pillaging and killing, and only Captain Bronwyn and her paladins were capable of resisting them; anywhere the paladins were not, the marauders slaughtered at will. More terrifying still, a dragon of the vast southern deserts, as big as a house and huffing smoke, had flown the length and breadth of Eriscoba. Thank the Brothers it had vanished again over the mountains.

  Meanwhile, the griffin riders, while not exactly numerous, had settled into aeries all throughout the central portion of the massive mountain range that divided the Free Kingdoms of the west from the decadent city states of the eastern plains known as the khalifates. While they’d strangled travel through the high passes, they didn’t usually descend this low, and the paladins hadn’t made open war with them as they had against the marauder bands.

  “And the villagers might not be exaggerating,” Wolfram said. “What if we have to face an entire flock of the beasts?”

  “If it’s a flock, we make them pay dearly. We’ll wipe them out to the last beast, the last rider. That is our way. Am I right, Sir Wolfram?”

  Her voice was firm, and she was no longer speaking to him as a brother, but as one of her paladins, and he responded in kind.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  When Wolfram was a child, his sister had given him affectionate nicknames: Wolf Cub, when he was a scrappy boy, the youngest of six; later, Wolfie. The name carried affection, but also dismissed him as a child, someone coddled by his parents and his hard-fighting older siblings.

  “Someday, you will be a wolf,” Bronwyn used to say when she was a knight in training and he would carry her breastplate and shield, “but for now you are only my little cub.”

  That had changed when he’d joined the paladins, and changed again when his older brother, Randall, fell to a gray marauder wielding the red sword. Bronwyn was captain now, the red sword hers and hers alone, and he’d become Sir Wolfram. But he wondered if she still saw him as her little cub.

  Now he felt a twinge of his old pride and love as she turned about in the saddle and waved the others forward with a gloved hand. She sat strong and confident in the saddle, her face severe and yet beautiful at the same time. There was a painting of Mother in the great hall of the keep that looked like that. Their mother, a warrior queen of the small kingdom of Arvada, rising in the saddle, a sword in hand.

  They were brave and proud, the barons and baronesses of Arvada, and sometimes hard and unyielding. Too much duty, and not enough tenderness. His mother shared that trait, as did his father, his uncles and aunts, and his older brothers and, of course, his sister, Bronwyn.

  On the surface, Wolfram was much the same as the rest. Strong and tall and a ferocious swordsman in combat, even at the young age of twenty-three. But sometimes, he wanted to be Wolfie again.

  Bronwyn ordered him to remain by her side as the two led the company of paladins onward. Abandoned pastures lined the road, shaggy with knee-high grass and six-foot saplings that would soon turn the meadows into forest if the shepherds and their flocks didn’t return. A stream flowed by, but its millrace was empty, its windmill still and silent. A few minutes later, they passed a pair of crofter’s huts with collapsed sod roofs and a sad, abandoned air.

  A bony dog exploded onto the road, barking furiously, and Wolfram flinched at the unexpected racket. A woman’s furtive voice hissed at it from a copse of trees growing atop an old burial mound, and the dog went slinking back to its hiding place with its tail tucked between its legs.

  “Should I dismount and collar the owner of that dog?” Wolfram asked.

  “To what purpose?” Bronwyn asked.

  “To question her about what happened here.”

  “Seems obvious enough.”

  It wasn’t though, when the possibilities might include everything from gr
iffin riders to gray marauders. Maybe nothing more than bandits, taking advantage of the collapse of law and order.

  “There are more than twenty of us,” Bronwyn added. “I have Soultrup”—she dropped a hand to touch the hilt of the massive two-handed sword strapped to her saddlebags—“and the rest of you are a match for whatever enemies face us on the mountain passes.”

  Suddenly, a frown crossed her face and she gripped the sword hilt more tightly. She studied the surrounding terrain with narrowed eyes. Her lips pulled into a tight line.

  Her reaction alarmed him. “Sky or ground?” he asked.

  “Ground. Prepare arms, Sir Wolfram.”

  Wolfram lifted a hand and gave a sharp chopping motion. Paladins drew their swords and unstrapped helms and gauntlets from their saddlebags. Shields came up next, with their gleaming array of painted fists, crossed swords, sunbursts, and other symbols of the baronies, earldoms, and free kingdoms from which they hailed.

  Bronwyn glanced over her shoulder, gave an approving nod to see the fourteen men and six women of her company armed and ready for combat, and pulled her horse into the lead. She loosened her sword in its sheath, but did not yet draw it. She raised her shield, which had the same silver moon painted on its gray surface as Wolfram’s, and placed her helm on her lap to get it in position to put it on in a hurry.

  The company traveled for the next few minutes without speaking, although the jostling, tromping horses made enough noise that there would be no sneaking up on whomever their captain had sensed.

  The road ahead passed through a narrow defile tucked between two hillocks, which seemed a perfect place for ambush, and Bronwyn gestured for Wolfram to leave the road and circle up to the right while another young paladin by the name of Sir Marissa made her way around the obstacle from the left.

  Wolfram didn’t question the order. Bronwyn had an uncanny ability to sense danger from afar, an ability granted her by the sword she’d used to kill the marauder, Wolfram knew. Sometimes, Bronwyn had confessed one night over ale in a Vilsylvan tavern, it lied. Other times, it gave her bits and pieces of information without putting them together in a reliable way. Knowing this, and remembering the warning of the Gronhelmers earlier in the day, he kept glancing at the leaden sky even as his horse crested the hillock with the road below him on the left.

  The road dipped briefly toward a river channel flowing down from the mountains. A wooden bridge wide enough for a single cart crossed the river, but the center span had collapsed, or, more likely, had been torn down by marauders to keep people from crossing. A squat stone keep sat on the near side, where it had long collected bridge tolls, but it had been sacked. Its oak door hung from a single bent hinge—the other hinge torn out of the stone—and the thatch roof had burned off. The whole thing—bridge, ruined keep, and weed-infested road—had a sad, forlorn air.

  Ironically, the river was so low at the moment that neither keep nor bridge were necessary to accomplish a crossing. The bridge was probably sixty feet wide from bank to bank, but two thirds of its posts jutted from muddy ground, with only the middle, deepest third of the channel carrying water. It was said that drought had ravaged the eastern plains, and while Eriscoba remained green and lush, the river levels were all low as they flowed west from the mountains to join the Thorft running through the heart of Eriscoba.

  But it wasn’t the destruction of the keep and bridge, or even the low level of the water that drew his eye, but rather a huge figure sitting on its haunches in the middle of the river with its back to them. A blasted giant.

  The creature had shaggy red hair, not only on its head and beard, but curly and almost pelt-like on its massive forearms. It wore a vest made of deer hides and a necklace of skulls and other bones that clanked as it moved, and it had jammed the end of a crudely carved club into the riverbed, with the top half emerging from the surface of the water like a totem. The giant was eating something, tearing off chunks of meat with its teeth and grunting like a huge boar as it chomped and smacked its lips.

  But why eat in the water? Seemed a strange place for a meal. Maybe the brute had clubbed its prey as it tried to cross and been too lazy or hungry to dress it and cook it properly, instead sitting down to eat it raw, even if that was right in the middle of the river.

  The giant tossed aside part of its meal, which splashed, bobbed up, and floated downstream, trailing bits of torn, bloody clothing. Wolfram’s stomach clenched as he realized it was part of a human. Most likely, the rider from the dead horse. A traveler, unwisely wandering alone in the lawless territory east of Gronhelm, had come under attack from a hungry griffin, who’d killed his horse.

  The traveler had escaped that attack only to be spotted by a giant, who had chased the tired, desperate man into the river and caught him where the water was deepest. A knock over the head, and the giant had his meal, which it was now enjoying.

  An hour earlier on the road and we’d have saved the poor fellow.

  Or been killed themselves. A giant of that size could tear a man’s limbs from his body as if they were the legs of a grasshopper.

  Wolfram slipped his left hand inside his tunic and touched the silver crescent moon on its chain, given to him by his father when he’d joined the paladins. It had two small bits of magic. One was to let the former holder of it—in this case, his father—know that its new owner was still alive. The second bit of magic whispered courage to its bearer. Wolfram heard that whisper now, and a small surge of confidence tightened his muscles and made his fingers twitch to grab for his sword.

  He glanced across the road to where Marissa was watching the giant silently from the opposite hillock. He waved a hand to get her attention and gestured back toward the company of knights. They turned around while the giant carried on with its meal, back turned, unaware that it had been spotted.

  A few minutes later, they were reporting to their captain. Bronwyn’s face hardened as she took it in.

  “This lawless hill country is in need of a purifying crusade. We could gather the other companies and sweep the area in force. Clear out these beasts and giants, all the way to the griffin redoubts in the mountains.”

  “What about the sorcerer?” Wolfram asked.

  Bronwyn strapped on her helm. “I haven’t forgotten him—stopping him is the only thing that matters in the end. Until he’s gone, the attacks and raids and lawlessness will only spread.

  “But I never thought we’d lose the road through the mountains—if a giant can sit in the middle of the river picking over some poor fool’s bones with impunity, the road is as good as closed to anyone but a company of knights or a small army.”

  “There are other ways through the Spine,” another paladin offered.

  Bronwyn glared at the man. “The sorcerer will never subdue this land. Eastern devils, all of them. Meanwhile, the old road must be reopened.” She drew her sword. “Let’s send this giant’s soul to the Harvester. It will be a good start.”

  They unloaded saddlebags and other spare gear—anything that would weigh them down in battle—and began their move, with Bronwyn up front, and Wolfram joining her at the head of the paladins. There was no leading from behind in Bronwyn’s company of holy warriors. She was the fiercest of all of them, the first into battle, and the last to withdraw, and she expected the same of her brother.

  The only thing that seemed to give Bronwyn pause was the red sword itself. Soultrup had the power to bind a man’s soul, and killing enemies strengthened the evil forces inside. Someday, she claimed, she would take one evil soul too many, and the sword would fling itself from her grasp and into the hand of an enemy.

  But Soultrup didn’t trap the souls of beasts, so she could kill this giant with impunity. And no doubt would, brutally and without mercy, if she could get her blade through the creature’s thick hide.

  Sir Andar joined them at the front of the company. He was a thickset man, about forty, with a heavy jaw and a scar that bent from his forehead to his cheek like the curve of a Marrabatti scimit
ar. He had a thick mustache, turning gray, that completely covered his mouth when he frowned. One of the first to join the unnamed order of paladins formed by Wolfram’s brother, Randall, he had ranged up and down western slopes of the Spine for years, fighting, killing, and nearly dying on several occasions.

  His helm was old and battered, his bent, oft-broken nose matching it in appearance, but Andar’s shield had been freshly painted, sky blue with a trio of gold stars in the center. The stars represented the three fortifications at the perimeter of his fiefdom of Greymarch, on the north bank of the Thorft across from Arvada.

  “I’ve never killed a giant before,” Andar told Wolfram as the company set in motion. He stated it casually, though the same nervous tension had to be coursing through his veins.

  “Since the giant is unlikely to have killed a paladin, either,” Wolfram said, “one of you will soon enjoy a new experience. I wonder if it’s still hungry.”

  Andar chuckled. “It’s fresh meat it wants, not a tough old warrior like myself. One glance at that smooth boyish face of yours, and the brute will feel its stomach rumble. Juicy and tender.”

  “Quiet, the both of you,” Bronwyn said. “This is no time for banter.”

  That not only silenced Wolfram and Andar, but the rest of the company, which was now squeezing between the hillocks that had made the captain fear ambush. When they emerged onto the open slope leading down to the riverbank, the giant was still squatting in the middle of the river with its back turned, sucking on something and picking at it with a long dirty fingernail. It grunted as it ate, and muttered to itself in a deep rumble. It lifted whatever it was gnawing at, and Wolfram saw with disgust that it was the skull of its victim, mostly picked clean, but with strands of skin and hair still clinging to the scalp. An object for its necklace of bones, apparently.

  Sir Andar’s horse balked suddenly and let out a frightened whinny. Other horses followed its lead, until eight or ten were stomping and pulling at their reins. Trained warhorses, all, experienced in battle, but the massive smelly thing ahead of them had them terrified.