Winter Be My Shield

by Spurrier, Jo

  Isidro shuddered at the memory, pressing his face into the crook of his arm to hide the sudden sob. He couldn’t bear it, not again. While Kell had subjected him to every humiliation he could contrive, Isidro had been able to cling to the knowledge that he’d still won. He’d saved Cam. Nothing could change that, and it was the only thing that mattered at that point. But here he was utterly powerless. What they wanted from him they would simply take and there was nothing he could do about it. He would be subjected to that awful violation again and again, until they had all they wanted and simply threw him away.

  When the day rolled around to the evening and they brought him food and drink, Isidro had made up his mind. He wouldn’t — he couldn’t — go on like this.

  His reserves were spent and the fever that had been fought down under Jorgen’s care was flaring up again, thickening his lungs and burning on his cheeks. If he was to have any chance of recovering he would need warmth and rest, good food and clean water. Well, warmth and rest had already been denied him. If he could find the strength to refuse to eat or drink, then within another day or two he would be too far gone for even the best physician to halt his decline.

  It was the mage who had led the interrogation who came to him, the one called Torren. He was accompanied by a Ricalani slave, a skinny young woman of about Sierra’s age with tangled hair and old bruises on her face. She carried a tray with a pair of bowls on it and when her master gave her a shove in Isidro’s direction he couldn’t help but pity the girl. Her master would punish her if she failed to feed him, but Isidro was determined not to let anything pass his lips. Either way, this would go badly for her, but he couldn’t afford to weaken his resolve.

  She set the tray down on a trunk and cautiously approached with a bowl in her hand. Isidro gathered what strength he had and heaved himself up into a sitting position, leaning his back against a crate. The insubstantial scar hovering over his spine throbbed like a fresh burn. It felt as though it should sting at the contact but of course it passed through the rough wood as though there was nothing there.

  When they’d returned him to this tent, they’d locked a manacle around the wrist of his good arm and strung the chain fastened to it through a metal ring bolted to one of the crates, before anchoring the end of it well out of his reach. There was enough slack in the chain to let him lift his hand to his mouth, but that was all — it would not have let him stand, had he the strength to do so.

  The girl offered him the bowl. Isidro made no move to take it. She cast a nervous glance to her master, who gestured impatiently. ‘Get on with it,’ he said in Akharian.

  With a glare at him for making her life more difficult she crouched down and tried to press the bowl to his lips. It held some kind of thin and watery gruel. Isidro turned his head away.

  With a curse, Torren reached into his coat and produced a Slaver’s club. The sight of it made Isidro begin to sweat, but he forced down the memories and the fear. With a growl Torren jammed a knee against Isidro’s chest to hold him still, laid the club against his throat, and took a handful of Isidro’s hair to wrench his head around and keep him from turning away. Back when he’d been a warrior, Isidro had kept his black hair short for that reason, but since he’d been injured no one had bothered to trim it.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Torren snapped at the girl. She tried pressing the bowl to his lips again and this time Isidro lashed out with his good hand. He knocked the bowl from her grip, sending it flying across the narrow aisle. The gruel spilled, splattering over crates and dripping through the spruce. The bowl struck a trunk opposite and shattered and the girl jumped back with a small cry, cowering away from his fist. Cursing, Torren backhanded Isidro across the face and pressed down on the club across his throat to hold him still. Choking, Isidro clawed at the wood and at the mage’s gloved fingers, but he’d spent what strength he had. His vision was turning black when Torren finally eased up and backed away, still seething and furious.

  ‘You want to starve yourself, you wretched dog?’ he rasped. ‘Fine.’ He grabbed the other bowl and tipped the water out through the spruce. ‘You’ll eat when you’re hungry enough.’ He grabbed the slave-girl by the shoulder and shoved her towards the ground. ‘Pick those up.’

  She did as he said, gathering up the larger fragments of the bowl and then scrambled along to the end of the aisle to pile them all on the tray. Still cursing, Torren strode past her and she hurried after him with her small burden, casting a dark look behind her at Isidro as she left.

  Gasping for breath, Isidro watched them go. It was only once he heard them crunching away through the snow outside that he turned his attention to the scratch on the trunk where the bowl had hit and broken.

  She hadn’t gathered up all the fragments. He could see one pointed shard lying on the green carpet of spruce at the base of the trunk.

  One small shard of pottery, half buried amid the greenery.

  He couldn’t reach it with his good hand. Instead, he had to squirm around quietly to take off his boots and his socks, moving cautiously in case the sound of him shuffling around and drawing sharp breaths when his battered and cramping muscles protested let someone know he was up to something.

  Any small items that fell on a spruce floor could quickly work their way through the twigs and needles to be lost in the snow beneath. If anyone dropped a button or a small coin everyone in the tent had to remain still until it was found, or else the wretched thing would be lost forever — even pulling up the floor was no guarantee of finding it. If he didn’t pick up the shard on his first attempt it would slip beneath the twigs and out of his reach.

  Isidro reached for his prize with his bare toes and closed them over the fragment. It was cold and hard against his cooling skin. He was braced for the sting of a cut — shards from a glazed pot could be razor-sharp if it fractured the right way — but no cut came. Holding his breath, he picked up the shard with his toes.

  It fell from his grip before he could bring it within reach of his hand, but at last he could get a good look at it. There was no sharply angled edge to provide a neat cutting surface, but the shard was triangular, roughly the shape of a spear-head. A sharp edge would have helped, but no matter. It would serve.

  He kicked it closer, but even by straining against the chain on his wrist Isidro could barely get his fingertips on it. Just one fraction of an inch closer — his fingertips scrabbled over the smooth glaze — and he had it in his grip.

  It wasn’t sharp. He knew how much force it took to pierce flesh with a weapon that was designed for the task, let alone a blunt shard. It wouldn’t be easy, but strangely he felt no fear, only a kind of calm resolve.

  Black Sun, I don’t want to die, but I can’t live like this. It was the only power he had, the only way he could make the pain stop. The thought of Cam troubled him — Isidro was breaking his promise, but he knew Cam would understand. And Sierra … well, his chances of ever seeing her again had never been very great. She needed to keep moving to be safe and he could never have kept up with her. She would know when it happened; she would tell Cam and then he wouldn’t have to worry about Isidro any more. He would no longer be burdened by the need to provide for his crippled brother, when the two of them had barely been able to provide for themselves.

  Cam would forgive him.

  There was no use in waiting. Isidro set the blunt point of the shard against his neck, braced the heel of his palm against the butt and thrust it in, gouging through skin and flesh as he gritted his teeth against the pain.

  There was a rush of sound in his head like the roar of a waterfall and then Rasten was there. What in the Black Sun’s name are you doing?

  Isidro didn’t reply. He’d broken the skin and could feel the hot trickle of blood dripping down to his shoulder, but there was a lot of muscle to go through and the shard was so blunt it forced the fibres apart rather than cutting through them.

  Rasten reached for the sigil carved into his back. His touch bit hard and deep and Isidro shudde
red so violently his fingers slipped over the shard, now sticky with blood.

  What do you think Sierra is going to do if you die? Rasten snarled in his ear. If she tries to take revenge on the Akharians now, they’ll kill her!

  Isidro faltered. He hadn’t considered that. She wouldn’t …

  She will! She loves you, you worthless cripple! I don’t know why, but she does, and I won’t let you drive her to throw her life away for your sake. Through that insubstantial scar, Rasten had a hand buried right in the depths of him and through that grasp he flooded Isidro with power.

  It roared through him like a flood of golden light, striking swifter and deeper than any drug. All his aches and fatigue were swept away by that rush and the chill in his bones vanished like smoke in the wind.

  Sierra had told him about this — that rush of power buried all the cares of this world, she’d said. Under the full flood of it she hadn’t cared what they’d done to her or to whichever poor soul was trapped in the chains, although by that point they were one and the same as Sierra could feel everything that was inflicted upon them. That rising tide of power had saved her sanity — otherwise she would have gone utterly mad as she experienced being tortured to death again and again. She’d tried to describe it but he had never really understood until now.

  Isidro fought to keep his will and his mind together under the assault of that flood. He could just feel the shard in his hand and the blunt throb of the wound on his neck. The power was giving him strength to resist the pain — if he could just hold on to his awareness for a little longer, he would be able to finish the job and it would all be over — no more pain, no more fear, just peace.

  Somewhere, he felt hands close around his wrist. Through the golden roar of the power, he could hear someone shouting in rage and fury. He fought against it, and the power lent him strength, but it wasn’t enough. Something struck him across the head — he could see shadowy forms standing over him, but they were thin and insubstantial, mere shadows of the physical world. NO! Isidro howled as he felt them winning, pulling his hand away. There were too many of them and they had power — he could feel it battering against the energy Rasten had fed to him — and they knew how to use it. It was already leaking away from him, pouring like water from a sprung barrel. Isidro fought and struggled and howled, but his chance — his one chance to end it all here and now — was gone.

  He was helpless once again.

  Chapter 24

  Delphine trudged through the snow back towards the Collegium quarter. The lantern dangling from her fist was enough for the soldiers to recognise her as a mage and step aside to let her pass, but Delphine barely noticed them.

  Visiting the slave camps always left her depressed. Back in Akhara when she’d first put her name in for this expedition she’d never imagined just how bad it would be. She simply couldn’t shake the thought that until a few days ago these folk had been living happy and free and had probably never spared the empire a moment’s thought.

  Slaves were the lifeblood of the empire. Without them the crops would go unplanted, the grain would not be cut, no quarries would be dug, no roads built, no ore hauled from the mines or smelted into metal. Without slaves, the empire would collapse and all five million souls who lived within her borders would be defenceless against the barbarians who envied their rich lands and their wealth.

  The problem with slaves was that the empire needed a constant supply. A certain number could be bred at home, of course, and those house-born slaves, raised to know their place, were always in demand. But for the most part, raising a worker from infancy to a useful age was simply too expensive to be feasible, so slaves had to be brought in from elsewhere. Unpleasant, yes; regrettable, certainly; but it was a necessary fact of life.

  Delphine simply couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all her fault.

  It’s not as though I could have stopped it, she told herself. Five years ago when a group of students looking for a research project had found Barranecour’s old log and brought it to show her, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d sent them away. If she hadn’t shoved aside the stack of papers she was supposed to be grading to open the musty, mouldering tome, someone else would have. When the world turns everyone on this earth moves with it. Only a fool believes he can hold back the forces of history.

  Back then all she knew about Ricalan was that it lay in the north and was buried under snow for six months of each year. But that book had changed everything. Her utter absorption in it had ultimately led to her divorce, the scandal of which had nearly ruined her career. It had driven her to stake everything she valued on a theory and had brought her out here to this Gods-forsaken wilderness of ice and cold.

  And now, after all that work, it was looking like a gamble she was going to lose.

  Nearly a hundred years ago a man called Caltoreas Barranecour had launched an expedition to Ricalan. At the time it had been regarded as a fool’s errand, a waste of time and money. The fact that Ricalan had powerful mages was widely known at that time. Akhara had contributed most of them due to the laws that required any mage trained by the empire to repay the debt of his or her education. Some ornery-minded folk insisted such an arrangement was no different than slavery and rather than submit to it they fled the empire’s borders to seek their fortune elsewhere.

  There were only a handful of places they could go. Mesentreia did not tolerate mages. Five centuries earlier they had driven all their mages out, an action that was singularly responsible for Akhara’s founding, as a handful of land-starved nobles had gone with them and established a colony on the continent west of the Mesentreian Islands. In modern times there were now other nations on the continent further west again, where such disenfranchised mages could try to carve a life for themselves, but they were primitive places and Blood-Mages were common there. That left Ricalan, which at least had the benefit of being close enough for some trade with Akhara and Mesentreia, and where the savage natives could be impressed by the trappings of civilisation — or so the exiled mages believed.

  The reality wasn’t quite so neat. Ricalan had society and mages of its own and they had become accustomed to Akharian exiles trespassing on to their lands, fully expecting to be treated like Gods. Many of them were no doubt killed, but a few were able to carve places for themselves in Ricalani society and once a toehold was established it was a small matter for newcomers to buy places there for themselves.

  And then in a fit of madness, the Ricalani people had turned on their mages in a long and bloody war. One of these Akharian exiles, deciding he preferred life and service in civilisation to death in the snow, had somehow got word to his cousin Barranecour, and told him there was profit to be had in the north. Barranecour raised the money and sailed there only to learn his relative had been killed shortly after the message had left Ricalan. The native clans were burning every book and record of mage-craft they could find and slaughtering any mage unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Faced with the prospect of returning home empty-handed, Barranecour set about collecting every piece of mage-lore he could get his hands on, in an attempt to preserve the knowledge before it was lost forever.

  While this was an interesting footnote of history for an academic, a century on it was all of very minor importance. It would have remained buried and forgotten if it weren’t for Barranecour’s log, which had been unearthed by her students one rainy afternoon in Akhara. At the same time as Barranecour was attempting to collect the dying knowledge, a Ricalani mage was succeeding. This was the man who came to be known in Ricalan as the Last Great Mage, or to his enemies as the Demon Vasant.

  The scholars of the Collegium, along with the Battle-Mages who served in the empire’s army, had long scoffed at the idea that the empire had anything to learn from the mages of a barbarian country, until Mesentreian ships began raiding the Akharian coast. Ricalanis had kept the Mesentreian Raiders away for centuries and, although no one alive today knew quite how they achieved it, there was no doubt they’d had s
ome method of defence — one that didn’t rely on having a battle-trained mage at hand.

  When she got right down to it, Delphine could only say she was to blame. Most likely the invasion would have happened regardless; the only way they could halt the raids was by sacking and burning the harbours that sheltered the raiding ships. But while the main Akharian force was concentrating on that goal, General Boreas was leading two legions into the peaceful tribal lands to the east, pillaging and enslaving villagers who were barely even aware of the empire’s existence, so the Collegium could find the hidden treasure of books and knowledge hidden by the Last Great Mage.

  The other mages on the expedition were certain Barranecour’s records were all they needed and that his maps and directions would be enough to lead them to the hoards. If Akharian mages were among the scholars who assembled the libraries, they argued, then the texts must surely be written in Akharian, as theirs was the language of scholarship, and the mages of the Collegium the world’s pre-eminent. If barbarian mage-craft had achieved even a fraction of the greatness implied by the tales, then it must have been Akharian mages who drove the progress.

  Delphine doubted the fates would be so kind to them. Every record she found indicated that the Ricalani mages distrusted the Akharian exiles and regarded them as troublemakers. She could see no reason why they would have let a foreign tongue dominate their craft in the face of their own long history of scholarship. All the books Barranecour had collected were in Ricalani and he must have been able to read the language, because he’d left notes here and there in the margins. There wasn’t one person in Akhara, however, who knew the language. Delphine had tracked down the descendants of slaves taken from the northern lands but not one of them had ever been taught the barbarian tongue. What use was it here in a civilised society?