Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (62 page)

Stryker’s arm moved with all the power those memories instilled, driving the blade upwards vertically from Hogg’s chest, into his chin, and on through bone and skin and muscle and lips and teeth, stopping only when it hit his long nose.

Osmyn Hogg – priest, witch-finder, and Stryker’s enemy – could not scream for his mouth was a glistening ruin, but a wet-sounding gurgle escaped from deep within his body. He rocked back, face cleaved near in two by a broadsword that had been a gift from a queen. The blade slid free, staying firmly in its wielder’s grip, but Hogg kept falling until his torso, shoulders, and head broke through the water by turns.

Stryker stepped on him. He eased his heel into the softness of Hogg’s throat, felt the witch-finder jerk back helplessly like an enormous speared fish. Bubbles erupted at the surface, red and manic like tiny volcanoes, but Stryker kept his boot there, hard and unyielding. He could see Hogg’s wide eyes through the water, felt his body thrash, but the sword blow had smashed his senses, bled him to weakness, and the struggles were feeble. Stryker lingered, weight pressed inexorably down, watching for the bubbles to fade. And then they were gone, the stream flattening above Hogg’s face, carrying his blood away to mix with the blood of all the other dead.

In that moment Stryker realized he had been holding his own breath, and he let it out in a great sigh that made him shudder. He paced back to the bank, allowing the body to float so that Hogg’s enormous nose slipped above the surface like the mast of a wrecked ship.

‘It’s over.’

Stryker had been in a dream – a nightmare – since seeing the pistol ball dash Burton’s skull to smithereens, and now, in the sudden calm of the forest, the voice of a friend returned him to crashing reality. He turned. ‘Over, Will?’

Sergeant Skellen, clutching his right shoulder close, nodded. ‘Aye, sir. You got ’im. You won.’

More nodding heads came into Stryker’s dazed awareness. Faces he knew. Forrester was there, bloody and panting, Barkworth too, eyes shining in the gloom. Sergeant Heel had survived, holding a halberd that looked as though it had been dipped into a vat of crimson dye, and Ensign Chase still clutched the company’s standard. They were all there.

Almost all.

‘Won?’ Stryker asked wearily. He turned back to the river, to the macabre dam and the cadaver floating at its surface. It was starting to rain.

EPILOGUE

Stratton, Cornwall,
17
May
1643

The hill was empty, the armies gone.

The morning sunlight cast great, shifting shadows across the stained summit as clouds raced off the coast. Down in the villages, men still died. They would keep dying for weeks as wounds festered and blood became poisoned. At least in that, Stryker reckoned, young Burton had been lucky. Better to die outright than take a bullet that turned your flesh bad, stinking out some musty chamber while they waited for you to breathe your last. That was what he told himself, anyway.

The cart lurched suddenly as its driver whipped the lumbering nags into life. The men of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot removed their headwear. So many hats, pots, monteros, and Monmouths snatched away out of deference for one of their own. They had lost many men in the great battle, and each had received a solemn burial. But this man, this body already white-skinned, purple-marbled, and stiff was an officer, and he garnered the utmost respect.

They had guarded him through the night, slept beside the trees on the summit, stared into the blackness like an army of grim-faced ghouls, shielding the lieutenant from the looters who crept across the hill, cloaked by the dark, stripping corpses and making new ones of those who still drew breath. And in the morning they had scared away the flesh-ripping ravens and found a cart, a pair of skinny dray horses, and a driver. A sombre preacher had bellowed at the dawn sky for Burton’s soul, and then the lieutenant was away, trundling south to Stratton and a place in the grounds of St Andrew’s Church. Stryker would write and tell Burton’s soon-to-be heartbroken parents of his final resting place. He would be compelled to describe the young officer’s death as well. He would lie.

‘Stamford’s in Bideford,’ Captain Lancelot Forrester said as he fingered the hole in his hat, his eyes never leaving the cart, ‘or so they say.’

Stryker, at Forrester’s side, felt exhausted, utterly empty, but he managed a wry smile. ‘Whispering of a great defeat for an army led by James Chudleigh, no doubt.’

Forrester shared the smile. ‘Of course! But the King will be mighty happy. We took divers arms and supplies. Not to mention their thirteen wicked guns, a mortar, and more than threescore barrels of powder.’

Stryker looked at him. ‘They had that much?’

‘And we had four by the end. Would you countenance it?’ Forrester shook his head at the improbability of it all. ‘A damned miracle, that’s what it was. A miracle.’

Stryker turned his gaze back to the cart. ‘Butcher’s bill?’

‘No more than a hundred.’

‘Theirs?’

Forrester pulled a dark grimace. ‘Thrice that number, and we have seven hundred in our cells, with Chudleigh taken as well. Suffice to say, Cornwall is secure. They’ll make old Sir Ralph a bloody lord next, you mark my words.’

‘He’d deserve it.’

Forrester lifted the hat, inspected the hole made by a musket-ball back in Peter Tavy. ‘They all do. Grenville, Slanning, and the rest. Mad Cornish warriors, every man jack of ’em. They remind me of Rupert.’

Stryker nodded. ‘You’re right. Worried to fight with them, terrified of fighting against them.’ He glanced at Forrester, seeing his friend still fiddling with the frayed hole. ‘Did Mister Jays fight well?’

‘Well enough, aye.’ He paused as a drumbeat thrummed from the direction of Bude common. ‘I’m pleased he took my offer of the king’s commission. He’ll make a good officer.’

‘Lest he turn his coat again.’

‘His coat is now red as that wound,’ Forrester said firmly, eyes darting up to the deep, livid valley carved across Stryker’s forehead by the peak of Wild’s helmet. ‘And if he is foolish enough to let it fade back to grey, he shall have me to deal with.’ He replaced the hat, face becoming stern. ‘I saw you speaking with Grenville after the battle.’

Stryker touched the throbbing cut at his head, feeling along the puffy skin and the raised, lumpy stitches. Grenville had come to him as he had been sewn back together by the light of a fire kindled by broken pike shafts. ‘Sir Bevil has unfinished business.’

‘You’re going for her?’

‘Colonel Wild is under lock and key, and he must sing for his supper,’ Stryker replied, wincing as his fingertips brushed a particularly sensitive knot of skin. ‘He claims Cecily had told them nothing when last he saw her. She was taken to London by an intelligencer named Collings. I have been asked to go after her.’

‘Asked?’ Forrester echoed archly.

‘Without leave to refuse, naturally.’

‘Naturally.’

Stryker braced himself for the question he almost dreaded to ask. ‘You’ll come?’

Forrester rubbed his chin slowly, stared at the ground, at the trees, at the sky. Then he grinned. ‘Thought you’d never ask. Will we be able to track down this Collings too?’

Stryker shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

‘I imagine he would know where to locate a certain Terrence Richardson. Grenville may have unfinished business, but so, my dear friend, do I.’

‘We’ll get them, Forry,’ Stryker said, and found that he believed his own conviction. ‘We’ll get them.’

Forrester whistled softly. ‘But how in God’s name will we discover the whereabouts of Miss Cade?’

‘One of our agents is there already, so Sir Bevil claims, keeping watch upon Whitehall.’

Forrester frowned. ‘Any idea who?’

‘No.’

The cart had vanished from view, and the pair turned away, making for the place where they had left their snapsacks.

‘Dangerous business,’ Forrester said as he walked. ‘We leave soon?’

Stryker stopped, nodded. ‘In two days. I have one more matter to attend first.’

Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor, Devon,
18
May
1643

‘Seek Wisdom, I—’

‘You did what you had to, boy,’ the old man interrupted. ‘I can’t blame you for that.’

Captain Stryker had returned to the tor with a deal of trepidation. He had left the place in a hurry. Such a hurry, indeed, that he had never been able to thank a certain Welsh hermit for all of his help. And, more importantly, apologize for destroying the tunnel that had been the former priest’s secret protection for so long.

‘It was the only way I could take down enough of Wild’s troopers to make a difference.’

‘I know, boy. I know.’ He flipped back his head to stare directly upwards, pale eyes the same colour as the sky. ‘The Lord Almighty knows too, don’t you Lord?’

Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner had not been the vision of anger Stryker had expected to find. The stoat-thin, filth-clogged recluse had rushed down from the granite parapet of the high tor upon glimpsing the small party of redcoats led by a man in black with a hideously disfigured face. And he had grinned his toothless grin and worried at his greasy, grey beard and slapped his skeletal thighs with delight.

And that had given Stryker an idea. ‘Well? What say you?’

Gardner had initially refused Stryker’s offered outright, but now, having met these men again, it was clear he had begun to allow the proposal to snag in his mind. He glanced back up at the lonely, wind-bleached crag, then back at Stryker. ‘You’re certain your colonel would allow it?’

Stryker nodded. ‘I’m told our old preacher died of an ague a month ago. Besides, he is aware of my habit of collecting strays.’ He turned to look at Skellen, mounted at his left flank. ‘Wouldn’t you have said, Sergeant?’

Skellen sucked at his rotten teeth. ‘Right enough, sir. It’s a sickness, the colonel says.’ He glanced meaningfully at the diminutive man seated on a piebald gelding nearby. ‘He’ll have you treated soon as someone finds a cure.’

Simeon Barkworth sneered back, muttered something acerbic in his throttled voice, causing Skellen to grin broadly.

‘What say you, Seek Wisdom?’ Stryker asked. ‘You won’t regret it.’

‘Aye, boy,’ Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner replied with a roguish wink, ‘but you bloody might.’

London, June
1643

Clouds scudded across the capital’s sky, cloaking the stars and dimming the moon. A cold breeze whipped at the waterman as he eased his boat into the freezing river.

‘Where to?’

His passenger, faceless beneath a voluminous black cowl, did not speak but simply pointed to the opposite bank.

‘Temple Stairs?’ the waterman asked, pushing off when the passenger offered a single nod and turned a thin coin between thumb and forefinger.

The small boat rocked, its hull slapped the surface, the splashes of the paddle seemingly cacophonous in the quiet night, but it sliced through the inky water stealthily enough, waterman and fare keeping watch over the north bank in silence.

At the stairs the cowled figure alighted, tossed the coin into its new owner’s waiting palm, and slipped into the city.

The figure was swift and alert, scuttling along the filthy streets like a feral cat, footfalls a mere whisper, eyes glinting from the cloak’s sepulchral recesses. The human shadow ghosted along Fleet Street, up into Shoe Lane, then right, passed Ely Place and over the stinking Fleet River. It darted into a narrow lane when a racking cough broke the stillness up ahead, and waited, patient and calm, for the noise to abate.

Off it went again, swift and nimble, aware of the danger a city teeming with soldiers posed, but utterly unafraid.

The figure arrived at a small building on Pie Corner, the stink of Smithfield invading the air even at this hour, and knocked three times on the worm-eaten door, then once more to complete the code. A man appeared, lantern in hand, wart-infested face glowing demonically in the illumination.

‘In.’

The figure slipped inside. The door clicked firmly shut behind.

They whisked up a slender corridor, never speaking, turning left through another doorway. And then they were in a tiny chamber, unfurnished and stinking of damp.

The figure lifted a hand and tugged back the hood. ‘Well? Where is she?’

The warty man gazed in amazement, almost dropping his lamp. ‘What is the meaning—?’

The figure was a woman. A woman with long, blonde hair, eyes like a pair of sapphires, and a temper akin to a powder keg. She stepped close, arm snapping out like a snake, fine dagger in her delicate hand, and she let the tip just nick one of the warts at the man’s stubbly chin. It began to bleed profusely, but he knew better than to move.

‘No more chatter,’ she hissed, her accent rich with a Gallic tone. ‘I am come from the Queen herself. Where is she? Cecily Cade.’

The man swallowed as though a boiled egg had been stuffed down his throat. ‘We—we received word only yesterday, madam. She is kept in a house up on Corn Hill.’

The woman frowned. ‘A house?’

The man nodded swiftly, eyes still firmly fixed on the knife. ‘The home of a grand man. One of the rebel generals, named Erasmus Collings. God place a pox on him.’