Free The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams Page A

to whom Morgenes was speaking. The chambermaids didn’t know anything about these kind of things ... men things. What did maids or serving girls know about armies, and flags, and swords ... ?
    “Simon?”
    “Oh! Yes? Go on!” He whirled to sweep off the last of the wall-blot as the doctor resumed. The wall was clean. Had he finished without knowing?
    “So I will try and make the story a little briefer, lad. As I was saying, Nabban withdrew its armies from the north, becoming for the first time purely a southern empire. It was just the beginning of the end, of course; as time passed, the Imperium folded itself up just like a blanket, smaller and smaller until today they are nothing more than a duchy—a peninsula with its few attendant islands. What in the name of Paldir’s Arrow are you doing?”
    Simon was contorting himself like a hound trying to scratch a difficult spot. Yes, there was the last of the wall dirt: a snake-shaped smear across the back of his shirt. He had leaned against it. He turned sheepishly to Morgenes, but the doctor only laughed and continued.
    “Without the Imperial garrisons, Simon, the north was in chaos. The shipmen had captured the northernmost part of the Frostmarch, naming their new home Rimmersgard. Not content with that, the Rimmersmen were fanning out southward, sweeping all before them in a bloody advance. Put those folios in a stack against the wall, will you?
    “They robbed and ruined other Men, making captives of many, but the Sithi they deemed evil creatures; with fire and cold iron they hunted the Fair Folk to their death everywhere ... careful with that one, there’s a good lad.”
    “Over here, Doctor?”
    “Yes—but, Bones of Anaxos, don’t drop them! Set them down! If you knew the terrible midnight hours I spent rolling dice in an Utanyeat graveyard to get my hands on them... ! There! Much better.
    “Now the people of Hernystir—a proud, fierce people whom even the Nabbanai Imperators never really conquered—were not at all willing to bend their necks to Rimmersgard. They were horrified by what the northerners were doing to the Sithi. The Hernystiri had been of all Men the closest to Fair Folk—there is still visible today the mark of an ancient trade road between this castle and the Taig at Hernysadharc. The lord of Hernystir and the Erl-king made desperate compact, and for a while held the northern tide at bay.
    “But even combined, their resistance could not last forever. Fingil, king of the Rimmersmen, swept down across the Frostmarch over the borders of the Erl-king’s territory ...” Morgenes smiled sadly. “We’re coming to the end now, young Simon, never fear, coming to the end of it all....
    “In the year 663 the two great hosts came to the plains of Ach Samrath, the Summerfield, north of the River Gleniwent. For five days of terrible, merciless carnage the Hernystiri and the Sithi held back the might of the Rimmersmen. On the sixth day, though, they were set on treacherously from their unprotected flank by an army of men from the Thrithings, who had long coveted the riches of Erkynland and the Sithi for their own. They made a fearful charge under cover of darkness. The defense was broken, the Hernystiri chariots smashed, the White Stag of the House of Hern trampled into the bloody dirt. It is said that ten thousand men of Hernystir died in the field that day. No one knows how many Sithi fell, but their losses were grievous, too. Those Hernystiri who survived fled back to the forest of their home. In Hernystir, Ach Samrath is today a name only for hatred and loss.”
    “Ten thousand!” Simon whistled. His eyes shone with the terror and grandness of it all.
    Morgenes noted the boy’s expression with a small grimace, but did not comment.
    “That was the day that Sithi mastery in Osten Ard came to an end, even though it took three long years of siege before Asu’a fell to the victorious northerners.
    “If not for strange, horrible magics worked by