by Tim Stead
“My lord, Passerina has returned. She awaits you.”
He rolled out of bed and ran his hands across his face. He was unshaven and his breath stank. He tore off the shirt he’d slept in and pulled on a clean one. There was no time to shave, but the servant had brought in a tray with hot tea and a sprig of mint. He drank a mouthful of tea and put the mint in his mouth, chewing it while he laced his boots. He ran his hands through his hair and spat the mint out. It would have to do.
His gut was less obliging than his head, and the tea seemed to slosh around within him provocatively. When he stood up there was a moment when he thought he would vomit, but he held on to a tent pole and the moment passed in a flash of cold sweat.
He had to know. He walked out of the tent into weak winter sun, squinting against the light. Passerina was seated outside his day tent, an empty chair beside her. Skal walked across as steadily as he could and lowered himself into the chair’s embrace.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About last night. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have drunk so much.”
She smiled a smile that twisted her mouth up on the left. “I’m sorry I hit you,” she said.
“I deserved it. You have news?”
Passerina looked him in the eye. “Aidon is dead,” she said. “He was killed by assassins while he slept. The men were pursued, but Aidon’s men were unable to take them alive, or perhaps they didn’t want to. Quinnial and Cain are both alive, but an attempt was made on each, and both were wounded, though not seriously.”
“And Carillon?”
“Is in some part to blame. There was a Seth Yarra hand in this, though Narak believes Carillon was duped to some extent. He is being sent to Quinnial for judgement, which I think may be harsh, given the events of the night.”
“It could have been worse,” Skal said.
“It could. The duke’s death is a blow, but we can recover.”
Skal signalled to his servant to bring more tea, and something to eat. He knew what he had to do now. It would be better coming from him that from one of his own officers.
“I am to blame,” he said.
“For what?” Passerina turned her gaze on him again, and he felt that she could see right through him, that every movement of his head gave away his innermost truth.
“Faste hinted at it when we were in Bas Erinor. I suppose he thought I would be sympathetic to their cause.”
“And you told nobody?” She was frowning now, a distant thunder to the storm of her anger.
“Faste is an idiot, Deus,” he protested. “Carillon, too. Neither of them could find their arse with two hands. I could not take them seriously.”
Her frown deepened for a moment, and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “I do not doubt you, Skal Hebberd,” she said. “You will not make the same mistake twice, and I have seen you with Cain. You would not conspire in his death.”
Skal nodded. He felt ridiculously grateful for her understanding, but he couldn’t think of any words to say that would not sound pathetic. The servant arrived with the food and tea and set it between them. He gulped a mouthful of burning liquid and tasted the sweetness of honey in his mouth. It tasted good.
“Enough of this,” Passerina said. “I have a task for you.”
Skal was surprised. He put down the tea. “A task, Deus? Do we ride to war?”
“In a way. There will be fighting, for certain.” She told him about Telas Alt, the queen and the king, their escape from the city. As she spoke Skal knew that she had played a part in the story, but she skimmed over some events and he thought it was deliberate. But it did not matter. At last they would be free of their enforced idleness, and there would be a chance for glory, even if they would be the superior force for once.
As he listened he began to eat steadily from the plate beside him, his head and stomach forgotten for a while, all his mind focussed on what was to come.
39. A Union of Houses
Narak and Sheyani rode quickly on the road to the north. The miles were dust beneath their horses’ hooves for the road was wide and flat, and the animals were fresh. He was surprised that they had not caught up with the Seventh Friend by the end of the first day. He was more than a little frustrated, also. He wanted to be away.
They had hurried. Midday was a brief stop, a cold bite to eat and barely enough time for Sheyani to stretch her legs before they were back on their mounts and moving again. As the light began to fade Narak was forced to acknowledge that he would have to wait another day. The sky was overcast. It was one of those pearl grey skies so common in winter, a sky that barely showed a hint of colour at sunset, simply darkening slowly to an unhelpful black. There was not enough light to ride.
They made camp by the side of the road, no more than ten yards from the edge of it. Narak lit a fire and went about preparing a meal in a practiced fashion, though it had been years since he had done it. It made him feel nostalgic for the pleasures of mortal journeying. He never camped any more, not like this. He sought out a wolf close to where he wanted to be, there was usually one somewhere nearby, and then he swapped places with it. Even when there was no wolf he sent one ahead, as he had to Bas Erinor and Tor Silas. The day to day rhythm of travel was almost forgotten, and as the night closed in he found that he was enjoying himself in spite of his hurry.
They had not spoken much during the day, but now Narak feared he had been inconsiderate in his haste.
“I am sorry to press so hard on the road,” he said to Sheyani. “But there are things that I must attend to after I have seen Cain again.”
“I understand,” she said. “Hesham.”
“Yes, Hesham. You did not see him?”
“No, Deus, and I am glad that I did not.”
“But you heard his voice?”
“Yes.”
“You are a Halith. What did you learn from hearing it?” Sheyani looked surprised for a moment. Few who were not Durander, who had not studied the paths would know even this much. But she shook her head a little as if to chide herself for forgetting in whose company she was.
“Not a great deal, Deus. I heard him speak perhaps a dozen words, and not more than twenty. I heard some notes of the tune, but not enough. He is resolute. He has killed and is not troubled by it. He had no love for Carillon, or for his men. I think they were no more than tools in his hands.”
“But what of his being? You said that he was no man.”
“That is what I heard. There were some tones that might have been from yourself, Deus. There was an age to his voice. He is very old and very powerful, and clever. There was a brightness below the age that spoke of achievement, confidence. He is not one to be taken lightly.”
Narak nodded. What she said encouraged his suspicion that this Lord Hesham was his enemy. He was the man with the metal head, and also perhaps he was Seth Yarra.
“Did he sound Avilian? Berashi? Something else?”
Sheyani shook her head. “I could not place an accent, Deus. He spoke fluently in Avilian, and his tones were more south than north, but there was a trace of everything, even Afaeli in the way he spoke his r’s.”
“A native of the kingdoms?”
“I cannot be certain, but I thought so, yes.”
Narak nodded. None of her words surprised him particularly, but he was at a loss to explain why this should be so. This man-god-thing was not part of the Benetheon. He was not visible in the Sirash. Yet he was similar to the Benetheon gods. He was old and powerful, he was of the kingdoms. It all fitted with Narak’s belief that whatever he was had seen Seth Yarra four hundred years ago and made a decision to use them, to study their ways, to learn their language and usurp their god.
The motive seemed clear enough, too. He wanted power. He wanted to rule the kingdoms and the lands of Seth Yarra, and he wanted to do so alone.
“Will you kill him?” Sheyani asked.
“If I find him. If I can.” There seemed no other option. His enemy seemed intent on ridding the world of Benetheon
gods, which meant Narak. Only one of them would survive this war. Yet the personal conflict did not ring true. Narak no longer thought of his own passing with dread, but he did think about the great forest, the wolves, the people of Terras, and he did not want to abandon them to the mercy of Seth Yarra.
Yet it was a threat that would not go away. If he defeated Seth Yarra again; even if he killed this man who claimed to be their god, and drove them from the shores of the kingdoms with a hundred thousand dead, ships burned, all materials lost; even that would not be an end. Seth Yarra would hang over the kingdoms for ever, looming always like a storm cloud that blackened the horizon. He could see no way to sweep it away forever. They were too many.
The realisation struck him like a thunderbolt.
In an instant he understood all the dreams, all the things that he had been shown by the Bren Alar. He understood the vast army, the new tunnels, the Seth Yarra city sleeping beneath a tropical night of humid stars.
The Bren were going to kill them all.
He thought back to what he had learned from the Bren Alar, the very first thing he had been told. Twenty million. There were twenty million Seth Yarra, and the Bren were going to kill them all.
The numbers defied his imagination. Their land must be a lot larger than the kingdoms to hold so many. He thought of what must lie there, the great cities, the towns and villages, the people. He did not know what to feel. If he held on until the Bren acted then the problem would be solved for ever, but he could not accept this as a victory.
Yet for all the surprise that he felt at the revelation he felt little else. He should have felt horror. He should have been appalled by the thought of twenty million dead, but he was not.
“Deus, what is wrong?”
He looked up to see that Sheyani had stood and approached him.
“I do not know,” he said. “Something. Nothing. Everything. I do not know. I need time to think.” And time to dream. If he slept again and the Bren Alar, the dragon as he now knew it to be, came to him again in his dreams he would question it.
Dragons had been made to destroy the world, but something had happened to them, because the world was still here, men still lived and built and bred across the land. He did not know what had happened, but he knew that it must be important, whatever it was. It was something that he needed to know.
The thing that hung in his mind was that it answered. The atrocity of slaughtering millions of men, women and children answered to every question he had yet asked, to every purpose he was dedicated to serve. It would preserve the great forest. It would preserve the kingdoms. It would remove the threat forever. But for all this he knew that it would be a wrong thing. Like the butchers work he had done at Afael four hundred years ago he knew that it would haunt him, even though the deed would not be by his hand.
“We should rest, Deus,” Sheyani said.
“Yes. You are right. We will eat and then we will sleep.”
* * * *
Narak dreamed.
It was dark; dark and cold. He could hear nothing but the occasional small noise of ice cracking. The eyes through which he looked were Bren eyes, but even they could gather little light here. There was a faint sheen on a rock face, a cold luminescence high above him that suggested a distant opening.
He tried to speak, but he found that he did not have a voice, just eyes, and ears.
“I cannot answer your questions,” the voice said. It was the same voice that had spoken to him before, a powerful musical voice, the voice of a dragon. “I cannot answer your questions because I am bound, cursed, doomed. I cannot help myself, and helping you would be that.
“You want to know why I am cursed. You want to know what the right thing to do might be, and how you can achieve that end. I cannot say. I can only show you things, and I cannot tell you what they are.”
The darkness vanished, and now he was standing in snow, deep and cold. Before him stood a mountain, sheathed in white with dark streaks of vertical rock where the snow could not hold. The wind tore snow from the ground, swirled it before him so that he could not tell if the snow also came from the sky. There were no trees or shrubs, no blue above him in the sky, just an endless middle grey. It was a monochrome world. These were the frozen lands, he knew. This was far to the north of the great forest and the plains in a place where nothing lived.
But he was being shown the mountain. He studied it, noted the way in which the left side hooked on the shoulder like a parrot’s beak, the way the ridge to the right descended in three steps, then plunged vertically into the whiteness below. He fixed the image in his mind. He would remember it.
This was a place that he must come, he saw. He must travel through the deadly cold and stand in this place, walk to the foot of this mountain, though he did not know what he would find here.
The image changed again, and now he looked through borrowed eyes at a valley. It was wide and shallow, grey green with scrub and rock, a bleak place. It pointed north, he guessed. Down its centre wandered a shallow, swift grey river, flecked with the bright white of broken ice that bobbed along, spun and stranded along the banks, tumbled in the shallows. Further on the valley rose and twisted out of sight, and standing vigil at its head was a sharp peak, white with ice, flanked and backed by a hundred other peaks that eventually merged with the sky.
This, then, was the beginning of his journey. He knew the place. He had been here once, but it had been a thousand years ago when the wanderlust had been upon him. He had wished to see every part of the kingdoms, the forest, the plains, and even the frozen lands. This was as far north as he had come, and seeing this he had turned back, believing that there was nothing beyond this but more ice, more snow.
Mostly he had been right to believe that.
I come here, and I go there, he thought. From the valley to the parrot beaked mountain with three steps on its shoulder, and when I get there I will see something, know something.
He wanted to ask what the purpose was, what it would mean, but he still had no voice so he stood and looked and listened. The river tumbled, the grass waved stiffly in the wind, rustling and hissing against the chatter of the water. There was a single cry, a bird that he could not see, long and low and sad like a curlew. It made him think of loss and tragedy. It made him think of Narala and Beloff and Perlaine and Remard. It brought the old duke to mind, the man that had offered Narak his sword at Afael some four centuries ago. The sword was rust by now, and the duke dust. That was the tragedy of time.
He awoke with a start.
Wind whispered through bare branches above him. Warmth from the fire glowed against his right side, and he could hear Sheyani’s breathing, the deep and even sound of sleep.
This time he was not in his aspect and his pulse was not racing. He felt calm. He put a hand to his face and it came away damp.
Tears for the dead, he thought. About time.
* * * *
In the morning he found that he was no longer in a hurry. The sky had cleared and it was cold, but he enjoyed the sun anyway. It brought colour to the trees, even if that colour was brown. There was a hint of gold, he imagined; treasure enough for a winter’s day.
They ate a hot breakfast. Narak built the fire himself and made tea the way he had learned when he was a boy. He still remembered, which surprised him. He made an oat porridge too, dressed with honey and dried apple. He could see that Sheyani was unsettled by the change. She watched him from the other side of the fire, unable to ask questions of a god.
“I had a good dream,” he told her. “It has shown me things that I needed to know.”
“Deus, dreams show us nothing unless they are sent, and no Durander mage would dare seek to instruct a god.”
“You think it was Hesham? Well, perhaps he can do such things, but I know the maker of my dreams, and I do not think that there is an intent to harm or trick me.”
“Pelion?”
“No. Pelion is gone, and I will not play a guessing game with you, Sheyani.” H
e finished his food and put his bowl down by the fire. “It is time that you were with Cain again. Clean these bowls – there is a stream beyond the trees over there – and I will douse the fire and saddle the horses.”
She did as he said, and soon they were riding north again. The frost was slow to leave the road, protected a little by the net of tree shadow that the sun threw across the way, and there were still white patches of grass on the verge midmorning when they caught sight of the tail of the Seventh Friend.
They rode the length of the column to cheers and salutes. It seemed that the regiment loved their colonel’s betrothed as much as the colonel. Almost as soon as they were seen a man broke from the column and rode hard for the van. He returned before they were half way past with Cain Arbak riding beside him.
