‘I accept your offer,’ she told him. ‘Your two thousand men-at-arms for the Gulon Veil. I cannot give you the Guillaume boy. He has escaped.’
Marcellus barked his laughter. ‘Of course he has. I should have known. Never underestimate that one, Archange. Very well,’ he said, ‘we have an agreement. Give me the veil.’
Valla wondered what the empress would do. She wondered if she was the only one in the room who knew Archange didn’t have the veil to give him.
Archange nodded thoughtfully. ‘If your two thousand can defend the Adamantine Breach as you say, and keep it closed to the enemy, then I will gladly hand the veil over to you. You have my word on it.’
He sighed. ‘So I walk away with nothing but a promise. It is an indication of my unswerving goodwill towards you that I’m prepared to accept that, cousin.’
‘If your warriors stand firm, I will be as good as my word, cousin.’
But Marcellus lingered, looking pensive. ‘We have a fall-back position, you know, Archange,’ he said softly. ‘It takes five Families to wield the veil. We can attempt to put a shield over the City, as was once intended. We are old and we are dwindling, but we still have Giulia and Sciorra and Reeve. It should be enough.’
The empress narrowed her eyes. ‘Use the veil as a shield!’ she repeated disdainfully. ‘Surely you cannot believe that?’
‘Araeon believed it.’
‘Araeon!’ Her voice cracked like a whip. ‘Then why didn’t he use it to stop the invasion on the Day of Summoning?’ She glared at him.
He spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘Perhaps because he was murdered before he knew of the invasion.’ He went on, his tone persuasive: ‘The Gaetas know about such things. Sciorra was ever considered a witch.’ He looked at Jona, who made no response.
‘You’re starting to believe our own fables,’ the empress told him briskly. ‘Besides, Reeve has vanished. I’m surprised you haven’t heard. He disappeared from the Salient at the turn of the year and has not been seen since. My agents are searching for him, but he is probably dead.’
‘His son then? Rubin?’
She admitted, ‘The son has a little power.’ Valla smiled to herself at that. She knew this ‘little power’ was enough to challenge the empress. ‘But he is no longer here. Besides,’ Archange added, ‘even if it were possible, which I strongly doubt, it is an outrageous idea. We might destroy more than we save. I realize you are profligate with human life,’ she gestured towards the ante-chamber oozing blood, ‘but that is not my way, nor will it ever be.’
‘Do you appreciate, woman, that Hammarskjald is using cannon?’ Marcellus emphasized. To Valla his concern seemed genuine. ‘That’s what tipped me off to his hand behind this. No one else has sufficient knowledge.’
Then, despite everything, he chuckled. He said to Archange, quite conversationally, ‘Trust Hammarskjald to bring cannon to a sword-fight!’
The veil again, thought Valla, watching Marcellus stride out through the blood-soaked anteroom, trailed by Archange’s guards. Why is it so important? She resolved to ask Elija about the thing when she found a chance. The boy seemed to know a good deal about the empress and her past.
Archange turned to her captain. ‘See that Langham Vares knows Marcellus and his army are on their way to the Adamantine Breach. We don’t want fighting to break out even before the enemy gets there. I want Marcellus followed,’ she told Gaeta. ‘And reports on everything he does, who he meets, their conversations, the steps of every messenger he sends. I am still not convinced he is not the moving force behind this enemy army. He must not be permitted to slide away from our scrutiny again.’ She thought for a few moments. ‘And I want the guard stepped up on your own palace and on the Khans’. We must keep Giulia and Sciorra safe.’
‘The Iron Palace is a fortress,’ Gaeta assured her, ‘but I will ensure lady Giulia is protected.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Will you give him the veil?’
‘Do you doubt my word?’ she enquired, eyes narrowed.
‘No, lady, but a mere two thousand—’
‘I don’t care a jot for his two thousand,’ she snapped. ‘It is Marcellus I want—’ she paused as if suddenly aware of her own words, then she said softly, ‘God help me.’
The old general Eufara hurried into the throne room, his face haggard with shock as he saw the dismembered bodies in the anteroom. He struggled down on his knees before Archange.
‘Empress,’ he cried, his voice hoarse and thick with emotion, ‘he slaughtered my soldiers … They were helpless against him! What demon was this, in the shape of a man?’
‘Get up, general,’ she snapped. ‘How many dead?’
‘More than a hundred, lady.’ He shook his head, his old eyes full of horror. ‘Every soldier who came near him. They were helpless …’ he repeated.
‘You are not to blame,’ she said more gently. ‘And it was no demon. No warrior can stand against Marcellus when—’
‘But Marcellus was dead …’ he muttered, his face puzzled, careless of interrupting the empress. Valla thought he seemed broken.
Gaius, captain of the guard, returned with a young rider dressed in the grey of a City messenger. The boy lingered in the anteroom, eyes wide, hand over his mouth.
‘Yes?’ Archange barked.
Gaius told her, ‘A messenger from the Great North Gate, empress. I thought you should hear what he has to say.’ He waved him forward.
Archange turned her gaze on the youngster and he quailed beneath it. He was hardly more than a boy, his clothes were torn and blood-stained, and he was limping heavily from an injury to the thigh. Valla saw he was weaving with exhaustion.
‘What message do you have for me?’ the empress asked, her voice suddenly gentle.
‘The general gave me a paper,’ he stuttered, his eyes darting round nervously. ‘But I was attacked and I lost it. I lost my horse too. I had to walk back.’
The captain said impatiently, ‘Tell the Immortal what you told me.’
The messenger bobbed his head. ‘The gate will fall before the night of the new moon,’ he recited. ‘That’ll be tomorrow night now. The general said that to me.’
Archange sat back on her throne and sighed. Marcellus’ presence had seemed to energize her but now she looked drained and weary. ‘We expected this,’ she told Eufara. ‘It was just a matter of time. The internal defences will hold.’
‘Yes, empress.’ The general seemed to have regained his composure. ‘It will give our warriors the chance they want to get at the enemy.’
Gaius put in, ‘There is a further message, lady.’ He glared at the messenger.
‘Well?’ Archange snapped.
‘There is plague, my empress,’ the rider told her, blinking, ‘within the gate. Our soldiers are falling sick, they’re dying.’ His voice cracked and the general gestured him impatiently to go on. ‘These invaders, we call them Plaguers, because they’re giving us their sickness. They’ve been throwing the heads of their own dead soldiers over the wall with their catapults. Everyone thought it was some foreign ritual at first, witchcraft, so we sent them flying back …’
‘Plague,’ Archange repeated. There was dismayed silence in the throne room. Valla, appalled, wondered how much more bad news there could be. The guards all stared ahead, but she felt hopelessness had entered their hearts. The rider looked at the floor, his job done.
The empress asked Eufara, ‘Have we heard any more from Hayden’s army?’
He shook his head. ‘No lady, not for days now.’
They looked at each other bleakly, no doubt wondering the same thing: if plague had taken Hayden Weaver’s ragged band of survivors as well.
‘Send the Bears,’ she told him.
Valla’s heart sank. The Silver Bears were the last century of the Thousand on the mountain. Without them she would be the only warrior in black and silver protecting Archange.
Eufara protested, ‘But that will leave barely two hundred soldiers to guard the palace, to
guard you, empress.’
‘Yes, general. I know the numbers. It will have to be enough. If the City falls then this palace, and I, will be irrelevant.’
Archange turned to Valla. ‘I will rest now.’
Valla nodded to Gaius and the soldiers started marching from the chamber. When the throne room was empty Archange’s chair was brought for her. It was a wooden contraption on wheels. She hated using it and, even more, hated being seen in it. So the corridors to her private quarters were cleared and Valla pushed her along, not speaking, trying to be detached and unseeing, her heart full of sympathy for the old woman.
When Archange was safely in her parlour, Valla gathered her courage and begged her, ‘Let me go with the Bears, lady. I am a warrior. It is what I’m good at. You have healed me so I can fight again, but now I …’ she trailed off, not daring to say what was in her heart.
‘You were a warrior born but now you are just a nursemaid to an old woman,’ Archange said for her. ‘No,’ she said and her voice was granite. ‘One defender will make little difference at the gates.’
Valla knew that one could make all the difference. But she asked, ‘Then send me to fetch the veil for you, lady! I will find it and bring it to you! If you value it so.’
‘What do you know of the veil?’ the empress asked her wearily, eyes closed.
‘You spoke of it in your sleep, empress. And I asked the lady Thekla …’
‘And she told you?’ Archange opened her eyes.
‘She told me nothing about it, only that it was a valuable thing which was lost. Has it now been found?’
The empress shook her head. ‘No, but when it needs to be found, it will be.’
Curious at her words, Valla asked, ‘Is it a thing of magic, lady?’
‘In a way it is,’ the empress replied. ‘It is an ancient artefact which has the capacity to heal, and to regenerate. To most people that is magic. But what I mean, soldier, is that the Gulon Veil came back to us once before in a peculiar, circuitous way, and perhaps, in this time of great danger, it is fated to do so again.’
PART SEVEN
The Gulon Veil
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
WHEN STERN EDASSON and his brother were boys – not big enough to do useful work but old enough to fend for themselves – they would ramble the rocky beaches near Adrastto, poking sticks into rock pools, chasing crabs, wading out into the silvery waves until they became scared and splashed back to the shore. They would pick up flotsam and drag it home: driftwood for fires, the odd ruined artefact, storm-battered and unrecognizable, dried seaweed and coloured clays they would take to the healers and medicine women in the hope of payment.
One day they had found a dead dolphin lodged on rocks after a winter storm. Benet wanted to carry it home to eat, but Stern stayed his brother’s hand. It was a beautiful thing, sleek and shining, its pearly skin just starting to fade and dry in the sharp wind. It was perfect, with no marks of predation or disease. Stern had seen, on his rare, precious voyages in his father’s boat, the creatures frolicking just out of reach, leaping and diving for no other reason that the boy could see than for the fun of it. He squatted beside the beast and looked into its dead eye, wondering where its life had gone to and if somewhere it was still playing with its friends. His mother told him dolphins mate for life, and when one dies the survivor swims their world, singing its mate’s song in every place they had travelled together. Then it would beach itself on the unforgiving, alien land and die there, drowned by the air, though no one knew why.
But in the end Stern had submitted to his younger brother’s insistence and they dragged the creature, stinking, back home. Their father beat them both as reward, for dolphins are friends to fishermen, and he forced the boys to eat the bland, chewy flesh and both were sick as dogs.
Stern often thought about the dolphin, though he had not seen another since he left Adrastto so long ago. And when he realized his brother was dying, from the sickness they called mouse fever, he remembered the dolphin. For years after he had seen it he had remembered the creature as a stiff corpse, but a few years ago he started thinking of it as a living beast again, leaping and diving for the joy of it. And now, watching his brother die, he wondered how long it would be before he remembered Benet as the young warrior he once was, strong and vigorous, and not this bewildered, bright-eyed husk far down the path of his final journey.
He held his brother’s hand and hoped he would die soon.
Hayden Weaver’s diminished army was camped far north of the Great North Gate, in a basin in the grasslands where, the general trusted, the searching enemy bands would not find them. If they did then they would all be slaughtered, for they had neither the numbers nor strength to fend off an attack. Almost a third had already died of mouse fever and many of the rest were too weak: recovering or dying. For some did recover, as many as one in three. Some were not touched by the illness at all, not Stern or the midwife Bruenna, who had worked tirelessly tending the sick and dying. Neither Hayden nor any of the Petrassi soldiers had been affected.
They had continued their campaign of harassment against the enemy: raiding by night the vulnerable fringes of the army, routinely hunting down scouts, and mounting occasional bold, swift attacks on a wing. They had carried on until the fever had felled so many they could no longer muster a fighting unit. And still they had not managed to quiet the cannon, whose thunderous roar went on daily. The enemy were winning. They had not won possession of the walls, Hayden’s scouts reported, but slowly the Great Gate was being battered to pieces. It might last no more than a day. And there was nothing Hayden and his troops could do about it. City warriors with families behind the walls dreaded their breach and the terror which would be unleashed there by the barbarian army, but Stern privately hoped the gate would fall soon, for then the struggle would become a familiar one – City warriors battling an enemy army on equal terms. But in the dark watches of the night he wondered if mouse fever had hit the warriors defending the wall. If so, then the City was surely doomed.
Benet had been silent all that day, breathing shallowly, eyes closed, his face like milk, but now he said clearly, through crusted lips, ‘I’m feeling better now, brother. I want to see Peach.’
‘She’s not here,’ Stern said gently, for the yellow-haired whore had succumbed to the fever a day or two before.
‘So pretty,’ Benet mumbled. ‘Do you think …’ Then his throat seized up and he could say no more.
Stern felt a presence at his side and he turned to see Bruenna. She squatted beside him and looked critically at Benet.
‘Not long now,’ she told Stern.
As a midwife she knew less about battlefield wounds than most of the soldiers, but when the mouse fever came they turned to her for aid – though she could do nothing but offer sips of water and a rough kindness which made the men think of their mothers and sometimes weep.
‘He’ll be in the Gardens of Stone soon,’ she said, for most warriors liked to hear that.
But Stern was full of doubts. The Gardens of Stone seemed a terrible place to him, a bleak wasteland where soldiers fought and never won, nor lost either, just a continuous battle without wounds, without tiredness, without end. Perhaps all creatures died as they lived, he thought, and if a dolphin spent its life, and thus its death, frolicking with its friends, so a man could not expect to enjoy a gentle afterlife if his days under the sun had not been blameless.
‘General,’ Bruenna warned him, standing, and Stern stood too.
Hayden looked down at Benet’s emaciated body. He did not ask how he was. It was obvious.
‘Brel and Petronicus have just got back,’ he told Stern. The scouts had been out all night. ‘They say the gate is about to fall. We must be prepared. When they crash through and on to the killing ground beyond we must be ready to attack their rear. We’ll move tonight.’
Stern nodded absently, his mind still on his brother.
‘What about the sick?’ Bruenna asked, planting her big
body in front of the general, her hands on her hips. ‘We can’t just leave them.’
‘The camp-followers will stay here with them,’ Hayden told her stiffly. ‘With entry to the City within their grasp the enemy will waste no more soldiers chasing us. Those who are on the road to recovery will come with us. This is why we need to move soon. Those who aren’t,’ he looked down at Benet, ‘we leave here. I’m sorry.’
Stern knew Benet would be dead before nightfall. Even so, the prospect of leaving him, dead or alive, was distressing. A decent burning in the company of other warriors was the best a soldier could expect, but that seldom happened. Sometimes they were put in shallow graves but Hayden’s soldiers did not have a shovel between them and the rolling land on which they camped was rock-hard. More often a dead warrior received the solace of neither grave nor fire, but was abandoned to fill the bellies of animals and birds.
‘The mouse fever—’ Bruenna began.
Stern was watching Hayden’s face and he saw tension snap into place around his eyes. The general disliked dealing with Bruenna, who seemed to offer nothing but complaint, but her women trusted her and they had been vital in nursing the sick. Not only that, Hayden detested the name ‘mouse fever’. The soldiers had started seeing black mice scampering through the camp a few days before the sickness struck. They held the mice responsible for they feared them. The general, on the other hand, believed the plague was caused by a miasma from the damp ground and he insisted on breaking camp regularly to outpace it. Hayden despised superstition and an argument with the men over the demonic status of mice was the only time Stern had seen him lose his temper.
‘This is not a subject for discussion, woman,’ the general told Bruenna, as he often did. ‘It is a military decision. Every move we make must be with a military purpose. We will break camp—’ Stern watched him briefly fumble for his timepiece before remembering once again that it was broken, ‘at dusk.’
He walked away and Stern knelt, and found Benet had died while they were talking. As he closed his brother’s eyes he felt only relief.
The Immortal Throne (2016) Page 51
