by Simon Brown
‘Because I’m the messenger, you fool! No one has travelled further or faster than me!’ He blinked. ‘No one alive, anyway.’
The farmer sucked his lower lip and for the first time seemed uncertain. He looked at his fellows for guidance, but they all seemed as unsure as him. In the end he shook his head.
‘I cannot risk it, you understand. You may be right, you may be wrong, but I can’t risk it. So if you’ll just be turning around –’
‘What’s this?’ cried another of those behind the picket. ‘’Ere, Noddy, it’s the old girl from Wyer’s farm!’
‘What?’ said the spokesman.
‘Y’know, from two mile down the road. She’s looking awfully hurt.’
Mikhel stood in his stirrups and saw the person they were talking about, and recognised the wild look in her face. ‘I’m too late. Noddy,’ he said to the spokesman, ‘I’m too bloody late.’
*
Mycom entered the forest, forcing himself to take each step. Things watched him from behind bushes, looked down on him from the tops of trees. He heard birds whiz over his head but when he looked they were gone. He heard animals crashing through the undergrowth but none came close enough to the trail for him to see them. Once he heard a small child calling out to him from just beyond the verge, but when he searched for it found nothing but strange, soft-barked trees that shivered whenever a breeze played through their branches.
When he finally got to the clearing the empress was already there, sitting on the bench, chatting to herself.
He cleared his throat.
‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘I don’t often get visitors anymore. And you are one of my very favourite people, Chancellor. You should come more often. Would you like some refreshment?’
‘No thank you, your Majesty,’ he said, wondering what refreshment she could possibly have offered him had he said yes. ‘I am afraid this is not a social call.’
Lerena sighed. ‘It’s the age we live in, Chancellor. So little time for social niceties because we’re always so busy, busy, busy. It would be nice if things could slow down, if life could be more like a summer afternoon.’
‘It is a summer afternoon,’ he said before he could stop himself.
‘A summer afternoon by a river bank,’ Lerena went on, unperturbed.
‘I think there is a problem north and west of the city, your Majesty. I’ve noticed more than the usual number of people coming in from the countryside. I talked to some of them, and they are running from something, something they are afraid of.’
Lerena stared at him. ‘From the northwest?’ she said coldly.
‘Yes, your Majesty. They tell me stories I can scarce believe, and not all of them agree, but something has happened, and when I woke up this morning I saw that the sky north of here is filled with smoke.’
‘I told you it was something to worry about!’ she screamed into the air.
Mycom reeled back. ‘Me, your Majesty? I don’t remember –’
‘Not you, you fool!’ Lerena said, then pointed straight in front of her. ‘Yunara!’
‘Yes, of course,’ Mycom said, feeling relieved, looking for Yunara. Then he realised what she meant. ‘Umm, your sister?’
‘No, she is dead,’ Lerena sniffed. ‘The other one. The one who looks like her. Oh, stop craning your skinny neck, Chancellor, you can’t see her. Only I can see her.’
It was like birds you heard but never saw, or plants sounding like children, Mycom told himself.
‘Perhaps I should do something,’ Lerena said softly.
And Mycom heard laughter. It came from the ground, from the trees, from the sky. Yunara’s laughter.
*
‘What has happened to this place?’ Galys asked in wonder.
‘Lerena,’ Kadburn said dully.
They were walking along one of the city’s high walkways. Below them Omeralt was spread out, looking as it always had except with hardly anyone in the streets. The last time Galys had been in the city it had been almost impossible to move around on a busy day. There were still people on the streets, but not enough to make a crowd. Many houses seemed deserted and in disrepair.
‘There’s more going on over towards the palace precinct,’ Kadburn said.
Galys looked that way and saw that the palace seemed to make up for the rest of the city; it was busier and more crammed than she remembered it, as if a large part of the city’s population had moved into the precinct. Then she made out the pens, and the people caged inside them. She could not help a gasp escaping her lips. ‘That’s where our fellow passengers were going,’ she said. ‘The ones in the other carriages.’
‘The cull,’ Kadburn said grimly.
The last they had seen of that cargo was just before Omeralt. After what had happened with the birth chain they had jumped off the steam carriage as it slowed down just after entering the city and before it reached its terminus. The other passengers in their particular carriage had not tried to stop them, and in a way Galys could not explain she thought they seemed envious of their independence, although they themselves had obviously not been part of the cull. Hamilay had grown into an empire of fear, where no one trusted their fellow, nor cared what happened to them.
‘Where do we go?’
‘I think I know,’ Kadburn said. ‘Have you noticed something about the streets other than the lack of pedestrians?’
‘It’s all so different from the way I remember it.’
‘I’m talking about what made for the biggest press, especially on walkways like this.’
Galys opened her mouth in wonder. ‘There are no sedans! After all our years in Kydan I had forgotten about them.’
‘Exactly,’ Kadburn said. ‘And I think it’s because only the wealthy used the sedans, and they’re all destroyed by Lerena or have run away to their country estates to ride out the storm.’ He scanned the immediate area. ‘I thought I recognised this street, even without the crowds. Follow me.’
He led the way down from the walkway to a wide avenue that once had boasted handsome plane trees and swept paving. Now the surface was cracked by tree roots and covered with piles of leaves and dead branches. Kadburn paused only once, counted entrances, then said, ‘Here it is.’
‘Here what is?’
‘Don’t you know where you are?’ Galys shook her head. ‘Come on then.’
She followed him into the narrow entrance way. An iron gate barred the way, but the lock had rusted so thoroughly that it did not take much from Kadburn to force it open. The gate clanged open.
‘What if someone still lives here?’ Galys said.
‘I said you were too honest for your own good. If anyone’s here they would have come looking by now to see who was making all the noise.’
‘I wonder where the owner is, then?’
‘Last I heard he was in Koegrah,’ Kadburn said, not entirely seriously, and led the way through to a small courtyard that had seen better times. Galys saw a crumbling fountain in the middle of a small dry pond, chipped, scarred and overgrown with unkempt ferns. One or two marble frogs, mostly covered with moss and slime, peered out from the edge of the small pond.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said under her breath.
Kadburn grinned at her. ‘This is where it all started, Strategos Galys Valera.’
‘The interviews for the expedition Maddyn was organising,’ she said. ‘This is where they took place.’
Kadburn patted the fountain. ‘We’ve come full circle, Galys. We’re back where we started from, back to see an end to it all.’
*
Paimer decided to risk entering Kethleralt because he was tired of sleeping outdoors. He had never been the adventurous type and wanted to sleep in a comfortable bed again. His earlier worry that they would be recognised and some message about them sent to Lerena had evaporated after seeing how much local administration had been run down and corrupted by every region’s need to provide Lerena with supplies and troops for some expedition across the Deepen
ing Sea, and to keep a constant stream of new Axkevlerens flowing to Lerena herself. Money seemed to be in short supply as people hoarded it for better times; fields were left fallow as farmers found no help to plant and sow, and small businesses were closed for lack of custom.
They found an inn which easily took them all in, since no one else was staying there and had not for several tendays. While Dayof took some of the Axkevlerens to scrounge up food and news, since the innkeeper had barely enough of the first to feed his own family and barely enough of the second to last the drinking of a single mug of beer, Paimer and his relatives gathered in the empty dining room.
‘It’s all gone bad, just as we said,’ his nearest cousin, Atemann, said. ‘We told you it was a sad picture. And it won’t get any better as we get closer to her.’
‘And we must get closer to her,’ said Beremore, Atemann’s son.
‘Why?’ asked Bayer, Atemann’s brother.
That surprised everyone. Bayer had not said much at all since Lerena had slaughtered all the Beloveds.
‘You’re looking better,’ Paimer said, leaning towards Bayer and studying his face.
‘Why?’ Bayer repeated. ‘Why do we have to get closer to her?’
‘That’s a good question,’ Paimer said. ‘But I don’t think there’s a good answer. At least not yet. Don’t you feel we have to reach the empress? Don’t you feel it in inside you like the rest of us feel it?’
Bayer nodded. ‘Why?’
Paimer sighed and rested back. ‘That’s the problem, Cousin Bayer. Always “why” but never “because”. We shall have to ride on and see.’
‘Quickly,’ Atemann said.
‘Quickly,’ all the Kevlerens said.
*
Lerena ran and ran as fast as her raptor’s legs would carry her, crashing through foliage and leaping over rivers. Her lovelies, her sacrifices-to-be, scattered before her, but she ignored them. She ran so hard she came to the end of the forest and discovered a great yellow plain, and ran so hard she came to the end of the plain and found an ancient city filled with monstrous towers that pierced the clouds but had no people anywhere, and ran so hard she found the forest again and there, in the clearing, her sister-not-sister.
‘Where are you going?’ Yunara asked her.
‘I am being pressed in,’ Lerena panted, her little red tongue flicking in and out. Some of her feathers, shimmering blue, fell to the ground near her claws. ‘Pressed in by time and darkness and events.’
‘Whatever do you mean? You must be hungry. Catch some food.’
‘No, no. I am not hungry. I will never eat again. I am being squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. I can feel it, sense it, see it. The world is falling down on me and I cannot get away.’
‘You are overtired,’ Yunara said. ‘Why don’t you lie down and sleep and I will stroke your hair.’
Lerena put a hand to her head and let her long black hair run through her fingers. ‘No. I am not tired. I will never sleep again. I am confined. Soon they will be here.’
For the first time Yunara seemed interested. ‘They?’
‘Callers. Family. Friends. I still have family and friends, you know. And another. The darkness is almost here. That little corner of my land that was lost to me has become a big corner, and the weevil in its heart is sleeping now, but not for long. Afternoon becomes night, night becomes terror, and the terror comes closer.’
*
‘It is worse at night,’ Galys said, looking out from what had once been the apartment’s dining room. Whoever had owned this place had been very rich indeed. The dining room was bigger than most houses Galys had known. Omeralt lay in darkness except for the glimmer of braziers burning far away in the palace precinct. ‘I have never seen anything so black. It is worse than the night sky, because it seems to suck light into it like a sponge does water.’
‘The sooner we do what we came to do, the sooner we can go home.’
‘Home. It’s strange it is so far away, across a whole ocean. Only four years ago I would never have imagined that this could happen to me, that I would ever find a place to call home that was not part of . . .’
Kadburn glanced up at her from his bedroll. ‘Part of what?’
Galys stared out over the city.
‘The university,’ she said softly. ‘That’s it, Kadburn. That’s how we get in to see Lerena.’
31
‘Will he recover?’ Lannel Thorey asked Velan Lymok. They were standing outside a hut in Orin of the Two Rivers. The Frey gurgled nearby. Flies buzzed around their heads despite being constantly swatted away.
Velan did not look into the hut because he knew what he would see and it made his heart heavier than he could bear. He and Arden had found Lannel at the village with eager militia properly armed and even half-trained, and then the governor had almost immediately fallen into the grip of a terrible fever, his body flushed and shaking, his skin sweating so profusely he stank like an old carcass. Villagers kept his wounded hand clean of pus and blood, washed his face constantly with warm water and tried to make him drink, but a lot of the time Arden was delirious and knocked them away. Now and then he called for Heriot. Once Velan had told him she was coming, but Arden had seen through the lie and cursed him before falling back into a troubled sleep.
Almost as bad as the effect the fever was having on Arden was the effect it was having on the militia. They had seen how easily victory was theirs when the giant led them into battle. Now what could they do? The enemy was vast and powerful, and they were only a few hundred. Even the addition of three new companies, trained by Lannel, were not enough to raise their spirits, and now the whole camp was in a depression.
‘I do not know if he will recover,’ Velan admitted at last. ‘We can only hope.’
‘We have to do something,’ Lannel said. ‘And we have to do it soon, otherwise the militia will start to leave of their own accord.’
Velan agreed. Somehow they had to strike another blow against the invader, but where and when was something he could not decide. As soon as they had reached Orin he had sent out his small force of cavalry to scout back south and give warning if the enemy appeared, but so far the Hamilayans seemed content to stay in Sayenna.
‘Lymok!’ Arden shouted suddenly. ‘Where is Velan Lymok?’
Velan went into the hut, trying hard not to gag at the smell. Arden was almost sitting up, supported by two villagers who were straining with the weight.
‘I am here, Governor. Do not distress yourself.’
‘Find Gos Linsedd!’ Arden cried. ‘Find Gos! He will come, I know it! The Kydans will come! Find Gos!’
Arden would only quieten when Velan knelt by his cot, held his good hand and promised he would do as he asked.
When he left the hut, Lannel told him half the village had heard Arden tell Velan to find Gos Linsedd.
‘Will Kydan send soldiers to us instead of fortifying their city?’ he asked Lannel. ‘I don’t want to leave Orin in case the Hamilayans come north along The Wash as we did. We are all that can slow them down if the enemy decides to advance on Kydan.’
Lannel shrugged. ‘If Arden says Gos will come, then I would say he is right.’
‘I can send a patrol west along the river, but I won’t shift the camp from here. Anyway, I don’t want to move Arden. I’m afraid that would finish him off.’
*
Gos Linsedd left Kydan with almost the city’s entire complement of soldiers and cavalry. Left behind in case the Hamilayan army somehow manoeuvred behind them were two companies of militia and the longgon crews, since carriages had not yet been built for the longgons themselves. Anyway, Gos reasoned, he intended to march as rapidly as possible and longgons would only have slowed the army down, especially in bad weather.
Following him now in a long line that demonstrated the effort Kydan had made in building up its defences were eight companies of infantry, three of them regular and the rest militia, and riding on the flanks under the command of Master
of Horse Ames Westaway was a full troop of dragoons, most of them untried but eager to prove themselves.
When they had marched out of the city the infantry had been dressed in their red uniforms with gold piping and buttons and their tall hats, while the dragoons shared the red jackets but added a twisted braid made from gold and green with a golden bandolier supporting the sabre and a brass helmet with red horsetail plumes, black riding pants and knee-length black boots. The column had made a stirring sight as it marched east by the banks of the Frey, led by a colour sergeant carrying the new national flag, red with its three golden stripes.
The glory lasted until the column was out of sight of those watching the brave procession from the advantage of the Citadel, and then Gos called a halt so the soldiers and troopers could take off all the shiny braid and buttons and stiff polished boots and horsetail plumes. The national flag was rolled up in its protective oilskin and put on the supply wagon. The infantry’s tall hats were folded and put in their bedrolls and replaced with broad-brimmed hats like those the farmers in the Saddle wore to protect their faces from the glare of the sun. Skirmishers fanned out in front of the army and the dragoons swept out further, covering the flanks. Then the march had begun in earnest, the pace increasing to three steps for every two beats. For all the fine display they had offered leaving the city, the new army had been drilled mercilessly in only two things: endurance and rates of fire, the first by long marches day and night on minimal supplies and minimal rest, and the second by incessant practice loading and reloading the new screw-barrelled firegons, smaller versions of the weapons built for the Kydan navy, with sharp-nosed bullets and wonderful long-range accuracy.
Gos had not wanted to speak up their chances in his meeting with Poloma, but he thought his army, not quite a thousand strong, was worth three times their own number. The problem was, the enemy was nearly five times as strong. He would have to work on whittling that down.
At the end of the first day they were met by two of Sayenna’s dragoons coming from the other direction. They gave Gos an update on what Arden’s plans had been, and he was relieved to hear the governor’s intention was to withdraw from Sayenna and move north along The Wash. They also informed him that Heriot Fleetwood and her children were not far behind. Gos was surprised that he felt a weight lift from his shoulders; he had not knowingly been worrying about the fate of Heriot. Indeed, before the army broke camp the next day Heriot’s small party was upon them. The children were cranky and tired, and Heriot angry at having to leave Arden in his hour of need, but their journey had been uneventful.
