Page 113 of Stardust Child

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Crassege was a wreckage built on top of a ruin.

Long before the arrival of Ospret Far-Eyes, the hillforts of the Andelin Valley had been the last defense of his people against whatever native horrors troubled them, lost to time and distance. Even Remin could not name them, and likely never would, for the lore of the Andelin had formed no part of his childhood in the faraway East, and the destruction of the Andelin’s cities and centers of learning meant that its own people could not name their ancient terrors.

But Remin always felt it, when he visited the ancient places of the Andelin: the weight of its long and lonely history, and the layers of foreign magic strung upon it like cobwebs.

“Reinforce the gates and start making torches,” he ordered as the wagons trundled behind him, winding their way through the perfect spiral of stone walls to the barrow and keep at the center of the fortress.

“At least we left ourselves something to work with,” replied Tounot, sitting up high on his horse and raking his fingers through his sweaty hair. It was the torment of his life that his hair was too curly to be neatly confined in a ponytail. “Do you want everyone in the barrow or the keep?”

Remin squinted at the sun.

“Let’s take a look at both,” he said, kicking over a stone with his boot. The other side was glossy black, a shard of the mirror tower that had once dominated the skyline of these hills, a looming obelisk made of oily black stone.

It made his skin crawl.

Fortunately, they had not destroyed Crassege as thoroughly as they had destroyed Ellingen. The Vallethi forces had already been departing when Remin arrived, their sack of several nearby villages complete, so he had only needed to knock down a few walls to take the fortress, then turned his trebuchets on the obelisk to pound it to pieces. Once, there had been dozens of these towers dotting the Andelin landscape, monuments of atrocity, but Remin had made it his policy to destroy every one he encountered.

The mirror tower of Crassage was smashed just above its base, jutting from the center of the old keep like a broken tooth. Long grasses and shrubs obscured much of it, but as he and Tounot clambered into the center of the keep, Remin could still see the Vallethi spell-work carved into the stone, and the handprints sunk deep into its surface, as if that hard black stone had been made of wax. Those were the hands of Valleth’s victims, some of them scarcely two inches wide. Babies, sacrificed to feed the Lord of Tales.

“I think the walls are sheer enough to slow stranglers down,” said Tounot, clambering around the perimeter of the keep wall and testing the stones with a solid kick. “But those barrow gates are beyond repair. I say we put the horses and supplies down there, wall it up with stone, and defend the entrance from above.”

“Do it,” Remin said, after a brief visual survey of the narrowing walls of the inner spiral of the fortress, and the large broken stones on its outeredges. “Get some horses to start dragging those stones in and throw up some break walls while we’re at it. If we can slow the devils down on the way in, it’ll be easier to pick them off when they reach this courtyard.”

The walls of the keep dropped twenty feet straight down to the barrow entrance and looked directly onto that open space: a killing ground if there ever was one. The only unknown was the purring devil. They had as much chance of fighting it from the keep as from the barrow, but Remin knew most of his men would sooner face a hundred purring devils than spend the night with the remains of a Vallethi mirror tower.

The stranglers were already cackling when Remin and Jinmin lowered the last stone into place over the barrow doors. There were a few slivers open to give the fellows within some air, and a very unhappy Auber would spend the night with the horses and twenty other men, a large enough force that they had a chance of surviving the journey back to Tresingale if something went wrong.

The rest of the men were with Remin in the keep, armed with bows, throwing spears, and piles of loose rocks.

And absolutely no reason to use them.

It was true that they were almost twenty miles from the forest’s edge; it would take time for the devils to catch up to them. And how far could devils sense humans? How far could they hear? Did they track scent, like hounds? Did they hear each other racketing when they found a new victim? Once again, Remin thought of Ophele’s treatise, wishing there had been time to discuss it among his men, to compare their own experience. They had been preoccupied with Valleth throughout the war, with little time to spare for what seemed to be tricky, troublesome animals.

“We ought to let some of the fellows sleep while we can,” said Tounot, stepping into the torchlight. Like Remin, he wore his full armor, with the crags of his home in Irenvale engraved on his breastplate in silver and verdigris. “We just had a strangler on the other side, but Galliard put it down.”

“I’m tempted to build a bonfire and see if we can’t attract a few more,” Remin muttered, glaring into the dark. He had chosen to leave the forest and the purring devil, but his stomach was in knots at the thought that it might have worked.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Remin replied, shrugging his shoulders as if he could physically shake away his guilt and regret. There was no point in inflicting it on anyone else. “I guess this has always been a barren bit of country.”

“Not always,” Tounot replied. He had a fascination with history in general and the bloody history of the Andelin in particular, and often had to be pried away from investigating ruins, no matter how hazardous. “There was a city called Carenton about fifty miles that way, famed for their groves of ironheart oaks. Livrach was a mining town at the entrance of the Aven Bede, and they had plantations of sugar maples to feed their forges. But when Valleth came, it wasn’t enough to feed them and their cities to the Lord of Tales. Valleth fed him theirwork.All the things they made, the things they tended, generations of nurturing and care. It was a mighty sacrifice. There were six great burnings in the 750s, when Valleth’s fires raged out of control.”

His voice darkened as he spoke, evoking the devastation of that burning over these barren hills, lost now to stone and moss.

“Perhaps we will make this place a stronghold again,” Remin mused, looking down at the spiral of the fortress walls. “If we sent a force in winter to repair the walls, and stocked the barrow with a year’s supply—”

“Edemir would ask whether that really ought to be our highest priority,” said Tounot, amused. “Trying to give me some ruins to study?”

“Well, there has to besomeway you can be useful,” Remin replied, giving him a friendly shove, and laughed as Tounot punched him in his armored side. They had been trading insults and shoves since they were five years old.

“I’ll remember that next time you need someone to manage the gate passes,” Tounot retorted, grinning. “Crassege’s not going anywhere. We can come back in ’29 as easily as ’28.”

The thought of such permanence was obscurely comforting. They packed up the next morning after a surprisingly restful night, and though Remin wanted to tell himself it was because they had evaded the purring devil, he couldn’t shake the thought that it had gone in search of an easier target.

It made him all the more determined to reach the Spur.

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