by Tim Stead
He kicked off his inadequate blanket and stretched. Dawn was well on the way, a weak light filtering down through the needle canopy, and the men whose duty it was to prepare the morning meal were up and about their work while the others lay on the soft ground trying to get a few moments extra sleep. He rubbed his arms to try to get some warmth back into his body. They had been moving south for two days, but it was still cruelly cold.
He looked across at the wolves. A few of them were watching him, sitting quite still and staring. He rolled up his bed and tied it onto his pack, then went over to get something to eat.
There was no fire. As far as he knew they were still many miles north of the Seth Yarra army, but he wasn’t taking any chances. They had been on cold rations since they’d come though the pass. The food was cold, then, and the work to prepare it was trivial, just measuring out a ration of whatever they had. It was dried food, mostly, and not the sort of thing to get you out of bed in a hurry.
They had stayed one night at the pass with Cain’s troops, and there they had been warm, slept in tents, and broken their fast with Berashi bacon, wedges of fresh bread spread with butter and hot, spiced tea. Tilian remembered it with mixed feelings as he pushed dried fruit and cheese into his mouth and washed it down with cold water. At least there was no shortage of water here. The forest was riddled with small melt water streams that carried the spring melt away from the Dragon’s Back. It was clear by the time it reached them, but still a bare few degrees above the ice from whence it came.
To the west the streams gathered together to form a substantial river, the Heron, which flowed out of the Great Forest a hundred miles west of the mountains and eventually delivered its water to the sea ever further west. They would not see the Heron until their task was complete.
This was the first point, though. Tilian was certain of it. Narak had told them that they would come to twenty points, and at each point a wolf would stop and wait, and they must leave two or three men with the wolf. This is what scared the men, especially those who were country born. While they travelled together they could laugh off the shapes in the morning mist, banish the ghosts with camaraderie, but once they had been left behind there would be just two men and a wolf, day after day, sitting and waiting.
It was odd that the city born men, the ones they had trained on this journey, were less affected. To them the forest was just trees and mist, gloomy, yes, but still just trees and mist. The country men, the ones from Latter Fetch, had a whole tradition of malignancy to draw upon. They believed in ghosts, in sprites that sat on your chest in the night and sucked out your life, in creatures far more powerful than wolves that stalked the empty darkness.
He had made the decision to match up teams of mixed background, so that he would not leave two Latter Fetch men together in case their fear got the better of them. He trusted that the scepticism of the city men would tame some of those fears.
Most of the men were up now, and Brodan was striding about their camp kicking those who had not yet risen from their beds. He had picked the right man when he’d made Brodan his lieutenant. The forester was informally effective, spared no time on silliness, and ruled the men with a sharp tongue when it was needed.
When all the men were gathered and the last few were eating the tail end of their breakfast he addressed them.
“This is where we begin our true work,” he said. “Look there and you will see a wolf that stands alone,” he pointed, and they looked. Sure enough there was a wolf that stood apart from the others. It stood motionless by a thick tree trunk, its eyes steady on the men. “This is the first place that we must be. Two men will stay with the wolf, the rest of us go on with all speed. You know that Seth Yarra marches north even as we stand here talking. We must all be in our places when the signal comes.”
He saw men nodding, but he saw doubt in their eyes as well. All of them dreaded being named the first to be left behind. Yet it was Tilian’s task to name the men. He did not feel up to it. He was their commander through accidents of fate and the vagaries of luck. Of all the men here he was the youngest. Most had skills that he did not possess, all had greater experience of life, and a deeper understanding of the world, or so he thought.
Yet this was his task. He looked around the half circle of serious faces, the frowns, the eyes that were keen not to catch his lest they be named, but it made no difference. Tilian had already chosen the first.
“Jackan, Apantor, you will stay with the wolf.” Apantor was a Latter Fetch man, young but steady, and he knew Jackan to be a veteran of Fal Verdan, and he had already proved himself on the road. The two men seemed to get on with each other. He’d seen them talking more than once. Jackan nodded. The man would see it as a compliment to be chosen first, and indeed it was.
Tilian took the two men aside and walked with them to where the wolf waited.
“You remember the signal?” he asked.
“I do, captain,” Jackan said. “Our quiet friend the wolf will call to the sky three times, and then we must do our duty quickly.”
“Just so. You have what you need?”
Jackan and Apantor opened their packs and showed him. They had two flasks each, and everything else that they might need. There was nothing more that needed to be said.
He took each mans hand, clasping it in the warrior fashion. “If the gods will it we will be together again soon enough,” he said. He turned and walked to where the rest of the men waited, and without looking back led them through the trees, south, towards the enemy.
46. Marik
“Lord king, lord king, the Wolf is come!”
Raffin sprang to his feet and strode to the door, opening it upon the excited messenger who stood with his guards beyond.
“Narak is here?”
“Yes, lord king, he is here and asking that he may speak to the prisoners, the Seth Yarra men.”
“He asks, does he?” It was typical of Narak to ask when none could or would prevent him doing as he wished. Yet there must be some urgency or he would not have come here at all at a time when so much hung in the balance. “Then he must speak to them. Go and tell him he has the right and my blessing with it. I will follow.”
The messenger ran down the corridor and turned out of sight. Raffin went back into his chambers and donned a woollen tunic, swinging a heavy cloak over it and fastening it at the throat. The fires in his chambers burned fiercely, but elsewhere the day was cold, and Raffin felt the cold now. Perhaps he was getting old.
He confessed to himself that he was curious. The war was in full flood. The armies of Seth Yarra were moving north along the western flank of the Dragon’s Back. He knew that much from his own officers at Fal Verdan. More than that, he knew that Cain Arbak was building an ingenious temporary wall at across the White Road to foil their advance, and he knew that mages had been summoned, that Passerina was at Fal Verdan with Narak’s reserve.
Yet Narak was here, wanting to speak to a Seth Yarra prisoner.
The worst of it was that he would not understand a word that they said. Two of the prisoners spoke Afalel, and so did Narak, but Raffin had only a few words of the tongue. He had always let ambassadors and translators cope with Afaeli visitors, and now that was some cause for regret.
He arrived to find the door to the cell wide open, and the guards standing and staring. They made way for him and he entered. It was hardly a cell. Narak had told him to treat the prisoners well, though it had not been his first inclination, and he had done as the Wolf had said. This man’s prison was more like a chamber. There was a bed, a table, a seat that a man could sit on in some comfort, and he had ensured that the food was palatable.
Now the prisoner was sat at the table, and Narak stood over him. A tubular leather bag was open and the table was covered with curled documents, diagrams, pictures. None of it made sense to Raffin.
* * * *
“I can see that you know what it is,” Narak said. He had thrust the images before the man, the pictures of a staff that
seemed to be sculpted from branches and knives, and the shock on the man’s face was plain enough. “What is it? Tell me!”
Marik, the Seth Yarra prisoner, was pawing at the other papers, but at Narak’s sharp command he looked up.
“It is the staff of divinity,” he said. “But I do not understand. These are drawn from the statue in Kerisalian, in the temple there. I have seen it many times, and the position of the figure in these is just so. Yet it cannot be.”
“Cannot?”
“The words that were written here, they are in the old tongue, the priests’ tongue. Not one in a thousand could write it so well, and yet no man of our land wrote this.”
“How do you know?” Narak knew that Marik was right, but he wanted his reason. It was important that the prisoner should believe.
“It is the things he writes. Here, look,” he pointed, forgetting that Narak could not read or speak a word of it. “He speculates about the composition of the staff. He says ebony, he says steel, but any priest would know that the staff is of Lessan Wood, not ebony, and not steel but platinum.” He pushed the images aside. “And he speculates on how the staff might be made! It is blasphemous!”
“There is, of course, only one staff, and it is carried by the god himself. Am I right?”
“Of course, yes.”
“So why would a man of our land want to make a copy of your god’s staff of divinity?”
He was rewarded with a blank look. It always amazed him that the faithful had to have their heads dunked in the waters of reason before they drank. What Hesham had done in making his own staff could not be contemplated by men such as Marik, and Marik was an open minded man for a Seth Yarra. They simply couldn’t grasp the obvious unless it was put in their hand.
“He wants to… He must be trying… to be… to imitate the god.”
“I believe so.”
“Why?”
Narak laughed. He could not help himself. The man was stumbling over pebbles. “If you think he is your god you will obey him,” he said.
“But we would know at once,” Marik said. “A man is not a god.”
Narak dropped the veil that hid his true nature from human eyes, and was at once the wolf god in all his glory. Marik stepped back against the wall. Even Raffin backed away a step or two.
“So if I came to you like this with the staff in my hand and I said to you – obey me, for I am your god,” and at this point he assumed the veil again and became, to their eyes, just a man. “You would know that I was not Seth Yarra, even if I bore the staff and spoke the ancient tongue and did miracles before your eyes?”
Marik did not reply. He looked terrified. Narak grabbed the front of his shirt and sat him down in the chair again, pushed the papers in front of him.
“Translate these into Afalel,” he said. “The man who wrote these words is your enemy just as much as he is mine. If you do this then perhaps your people’s eyes can be opened, and they will know this pretender for the hollow thing he is.”
Marik shook his head. He was still pale, but he was not refusing the work.
“They will not believe you,” he said. “You are the demon, Fenris Godkiller. They cannot believe you.”
Narak glanced across at Raffin. The king was the only one in the room with him, and he knew that the king spoke no Afalel, so what he said to Marik would be between the two of them. The guards, even if by some chance one of them did speak the tongue, were too distant to hear.
“I am trying to save your people, Marik,” he said. There is another force abroad that seeks to destroy you, all of you, and not just here in the six kingdoms. I need to find a lever to stop this thing, to end the war. I need a truce at least.”
Marik stared at him. “Why would you help us?” he asked.
Narak shrugged. “Men are men,” he said. “You will follow where you are led, you will do as you are told, you will believe what you are shown. Gods are not men, even those of us who sometimes think that we are. A god who uses men, who sends them to slaughter, to kill and be killed, is not worthy of the appellation. If Seth Yarra wants me dead let him come and kill me. I will face him at a time and place of common consent and if he takes my life, then I am ended. Why must a hundred thousand die? Why should untold millions die?”
Marik looked at him – in the way that a mouse watches a snake.
“You are Fenris,” he said. “They teach that even when you speak the truth it is a lie.”
“And you believe this?”
Marik looked away. It was as though he had not believed that Narak was Narak until he had seen him in his aspect, and now he had lost what little rapport there had been.
“It is taught,” he replied.
“And yet you have seen what is written here. You have seen the intent of this man, this creature, to deceive your priests, your leaders, and all your people. You must choose which is the lesser evil. Yet I must say that your choice lies between what you see with your own eyes and what you have been told by men who have been told, and so on back to the original lie. Fenris is your myth. It is not of my making.”
Marik now said nothing, but seemed to withdraw into himself, his eyes reluctantly drawn to the documents as though they were some sort of poison that might find its way within him just by being looked at. Narak was beginning to lose patience.
“Will you do this for me?” he asked.
Even as Narak asked he knew that he could no longer trust this man, even the small amount that he had done so in the past. If he left Hesham’s documents here there was a fair chance that Marik would try to destroy them in the misapprehension that he was foiling some plot against his god. He began to gather up the papers, rolling them once more into a tight bundle that he might fit into the leather tube. It was unfortunate. Of all the prisoners that were held he had thought this man the most likely to do his bidding. Now he must try another. There was so little time.
He turned to Raffin, who had been waiting in patient incomprehension all this time.
“Lord King,” he said. “I have some captured documents, these that you see in my hand. They are written in the priestly Seth Yarra tongue, and I had hoped that this man would render them into Afalel, but it seems his faith in Seth Yarra is too great for him to trust me, and for me to trust him. I thank you for your help in this, but time is pressing, and there is one other who might serve as well, so I regret that I must bid you farewell and leave at once.”
The king nodded, somewhat bemused, Narak thought, as well he might be.
“And what do you think the documents might contain?” he asked.
“It is difficult to be certain,” Narak replied. Did he want to tell Raffin the truth? Was it time for so irretrievable a step? A part of it, perhaps. “There seems to be a plot against both the Seth Yarra and the peoples of the six Kingdoms,” he said. “It may be that their war has been caused by this deception, and if it can be shown to be false, then we may be able to end the war very quickly.”
The king seemed taken aback. “A plot? Devised by whom?”
“I do not know,” Narak said. It was half a lie. He knew the name of Lord Hesham, he knew the metal headed assassin, but he was sure that whatever these creatures were, even if they were one and the same, that there was another name by which they should be called. This he did not know.
Raffin frowned. “The papers are written in some Seth Yarra tongue,” he said. “Surely that means the plot originates there?”
“It is not certain. There are some indications that the men of the six kingdoms are involved – things that Seth Yarra should know seem not to be known.”
“Telans?”
Narak shrugged. He had gone as far as he was prepared to go. He did not feel that it would help Raffin to know that a creature similar to Narak himself was roaming the land plotting the downfall of kingdoms, and planning to rule what remained of the world as the god Seth Yarra. It would not help at all.
“I will uncover the roots of this, lord king,” he said. “Do not doubt
that I shall. But now urgent matters demand my attention.”
In a moment he stood again on the ledge where he had left the Durander mages in the cold, crisp air of the White Road, and the wind was blowing from the south.
47. The Burning Ships
Paddles dipped almost silently into the water, propelling the canoe across the sea, the sound of its surging progress concealed in the shuffle and hiss of small waves on the distant beach. The paddlers did not speak. To the east there was the faintest hint of light, the ghosts of the mountains that were the Dragon’s Back standing out against the pre-dawn light like shadows upon shadows.
