The Bloodstained God (Book 2)

by Tim Stead

  She shook her head, and for a moment her eyes seemed to clear. “I killed them,” she said. “I stole their lives, but it’s too much. I cannot hold on.” Her body jerked, pulled about by a painful spasm. Her face was pale, almost bloodless. Narak held her shoulder and took her right hand in his.

  “What can we do?” he asked.

  “I can do more,” she said, apparently mishearing him. “I can bend men to my will, I can see through any eyes, I can heal, I can kill. I do not understand it.”

  He exchanged a look with Jidian. All these things were impossible, except for killing, yet there were many dead Seth Yarra outside Wolfguard who had died without spilt blood.

  “Can it be true?” Jidian asked. “Is she Pelion’s true heir?”

  “Myths and nonsense,” Narak snapped, but the thought burrowed into his mind. He thought of Caster. Surely it was too late by now? The clarity had gone out of Pascha’s eyes. They darted about the passageway, fixing briefly on anything that stood out, faces, lamps, shadows. He tried to get her attention again. He steered her head round by the chin and looked into her eyes, but they slid away.

  “Pascha,” he asked, “can you heal?”

  She didn’t answer. He desperately wanted it all to make sense, for her to have the power, but she was the most unlikely of all of them. She was the reluctant god, the denier. If she could have shed all her powers she would have done it centuries ago.

  “There are too many of them,” she said. “They’re all inside me.” She jerked against his hand again like something had burned her. She looked sick, deathly sick. It occurred to Narak that he might lose her as well, the last remnant of Wolfguard that was. She might be dying in his arms.

  He felt dizzy. It was as though the floor vanished from beneath his feet, and for the first time for a thousand years he felt fear instead of anger. She was the one, he realised. More than Caster, more than Perlaine or Narala, more than all of them put together, she was the one. He had always assumed that she would be there. Their differences, their arguments, the anger between them, all of it had been trivial and pointless. He had always known that she would come back to him, or at least he had always assumed it. They were immortal. She was the one that gave it meaning.

  How had he not seen it? Without Pascha there could be no Narak. There would be no point to him.

  “Pascha, don’t go away,” he said. He could not bring himself to use the word, to ask her not to die.

  She looked at him again, and he could see pain in her green eyes, pain in the blue veins that traced patterns beneath her pale skin. “I have to let go,” she said.

  “No, you have to hold on,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “They’re inside me.” Her breath caught for a moment and her eyes closed.

  “Pascha!” Her eyes opened again. He had never seen them so green, like emeralds held up to the sun. It looked unnatural.

  “Narak. I hope…”

  The world seemed to explode about Narak. He was abruptly blind and deaf. Everything was brightness, though, not dark, and the world shrieked and roared in his ears so loud that it was a physical pain. He was on fire, too. His skin felt as though ice and molten metal both were being poured upon it. He scented nothing but iron and blood and snow. He tried to move, but could not. It was as though he had ceased to exist and was now part of a river of solid noise and light, fire and ice.

  As quickly as it began, it ended. He was lying on his back in the comparative silence of Jidian shouting his name. His whole body stung as though it had been slapped and his ears echoed with emptiness. He found that he was still holding Pascha’s hand, and he levered himself upright and looked at her.

  “What happened?” Jidian demanded. He looked wild eyed, afraid, if it were possible for the eagle to be afraid. Sithmaree stood further back in shadow, her body pressed against the wall. Narak could not see her eyes.

  Pascha, on the other hand, looked serene. There was no sign upon her now of the pain that had been so evident before. She lay with her eyes closed, as still as the dead. Narak put his finger to her pale throat to feel the life there and was relieved to find it at once, beating out a steady rhythm, strong and clear.

  “What happened?” Jidian asked once more, though his tone was less urgent, seeing Narak move with purpose.

  “I do not know,” he replied. “What seemed to happen?”

  “She went rigid, like as board. You collapsed, then she wasn’t rigid. Didn’t you feel anything?”

  “I felt everything,” he said. He turned back to Pascha. “Pascha?” He shook her shoulder gently, touched her cheek, but she did not stir.

  “Is she alive?” Jidian asked.

  “Yes. The sign of life is there, but she will not wake.”

  “Perhaps it is the sleep of death,” Jidian said.

  “She will live, I am certain,” Narak replied. Jidian had sounded almost hopeful. The eagle understood nothing of what had passed here, and although Narak was in the same predicament he did not fear it as Jidian and Sithmaree did. If Pascha had some new power, even if she was Pelion’s true heir, she was still Pascha. She would always be Pascha.

  “Narak.”

  He knew the voice again, but he did not believe it. He turned and saw Caster walking up the tunnel behind Jidian, quite alive and missing the three fatal arrows.

  “Caster!” He was overjoyed.

  “He is a ghost!” Jidian said.

  “I thought so too,” Caster said. He punched Jidian lightly on the shoulder, making the eagle jump, “but apparently not.”

  “A miracle, then,” Narak said. “I am glad to see you whole again, old friend.” One of the many weights that burdened Narak seemed to lift from his shoulders, and the world seemed a brighter place. Perhaps she was, after all, the true heir.

  The myth went back to something Pelion had said to them all fifteen centuries ago. You are all my children, but there can be only one heir. He had declined to name an heir, and many had assumed that Narak was the chosen one because he was as close to the old god as any of them, and Pelion seemed to favour him. It had been said so often that Narak himself had demanded that Pelion deny it, but he had not. All he would say was you are the one who will do what must be done. That was typical Pelion, direct and forthright one moment, mumbling and cryptic the next. The one thing he was sure of was that Pelion could not see the future any more than Narak could.

  So Narak had worn the label reluctantly for a while, but it had faded with the years. Beloff had mocked him occasionally as The Doer of the Necessary, but it had been meant in good part and Narak had learned to laugh with the bear. It was part of the gruff old monster’s lessons in not taking himself seriously. So he had learned not to believe in his own godhood, at least not entirely.

  Yet it was all nonsense. Pelion had never said that there was an heir. He had been teasing them, laughing at their naivety and uncertainty. Narak had been sure of it.

  But Caster stood before him. He clasped his old friend by the arm and felt a new strength in his grip. There was no doubt. Narak was surprised again. Caster was stronger than he had been. His life burned brighter.

  “Not just made whole,” Caster said to him, smiling. “Made better.”

  What had she done, Narak wondered? How many others had been affected? If Caster had been restored it could only have been through him, because he had held Pascha when she had… what had she said?... let go? So those others gathered in the old throne room, what had they felt? And Cain and Sheyani?

  He wished that she would wake.

  63. Reborn

  It was dark, and Cain Arbak awoke from dreams of fire and snow. He awoke with a rush, hurled from his dreams by a sense of urgency that a tired body could do little to resist. He sat up in bed and threw aside the blankets and furs that covered him. He felt hot, too hot for all that, as though he had a fever.

  “Did you feel it?” Sheyani was awake, too.

  “I dreamed,” he said. “Is it hot in here?”

&nbs
p; “No hotter than it should be,” she said. “You felt it in your dream.”

  “Felt what?”

  “I do not know. It was magic of some kind. Great magic. I know it, but I have never felt its like before.”

  The sensations of his dream were fading quickly, but there was a vestigial memory of fire and ice, and a shadow.

  “Death,” he said. “I dreamed of death.”

  “Not just death,” she replied.

  “No. Death and life, or something at least that was different from death.”

  Sheyani climbed out of bed and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders against the cold. Even in summer it was cold this far north. Already it seemed that the Dragon’s Back was better dressed that it had been when they arrived, white shrouds of snow creeping down its shoulders towards them.

  She lit a lamp and put it on the table beside her. She looked at Cain and smiled.

  “You look young in lamplight,” she teased.

  “Well, you accepted my offer and married an old man. Now you have to live with it.”

  She laughed, and then she frowned, leaned closer to him. “Your hair…” she said. She turned around and picked up the lamp, raised it above his head so that she could see him more clearly. She touched his hair, lifted it in her hand. “Pelion’s eyes!” she exclaimed. “Your hair is black!”

  “A trick of the light,” he said. But Sheyani shook her head and leaned closer still.

  “It is so,” she said. “The grey is gone, and your face seems different, younger. Sheshay, you must get a mirror.”

  Now Cain was a little alarmed. She was serious. He stepped out of bed and picked up another lamp and lit it. He held it up and looked at Sheyani. His wife and lover had covered her nose and mouth with her hands, almost in at attitude of prayer. Her eyes were large with wonder and she stared at him.

  “What is it?” he said.

  She pointed, unable to speak, but her face was full of light and joy as it had been on that first day that they knew they loved one another. He looked where she pointed and saw nothing.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Your hand,” she said. “By all the gods and mages born,” she said. “Your hand.”

  He looked at his hand and saw nothing remarkable, but…

  His hand. His right hand that he had lost to the Wolf before the mines of Bel Erinor, the hand he had worked so hard to replace with his left. His hand had come home in the night and now occupied its rightful place at the end of his arm. He had two hands again.

  He sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed.

  “My hand,” he said, staring at it, uncertain if he should be pleased or afraid. “What has happened?”

  Sheyani shook her head. “I do not know, Sheshay. I only know that this is great magic, the magic that was lost. It has come back.”

  Cain took the lamp up again and looked more closely at Sheyani. He looked for the fine lines, the crows’ feet about the corners of her eyes, the lines that gathered about her mouth when she smiled. They were gone. He touched her face.

  “We are young again,” he said. It was true. He felt it in his back and shoulders. The customary stiffness was gone, and Sheyani almost resembled a child, small and crop haired as she was.

  “More,” she said. “Do you not feel it? It is more than that.”

  He did. Now that she drew his attention to is he felt a burning energy filing him. He felt strong, clear headed, but maybe that was just being young again, and being in love. He had forgotten what that might be like.

  “I do not know,” he said.

  She laughed again. “How will you tell your men?” she asked. “When they see this dark haired, two handed, handsome boy emerge from their general’s tent they will not believe who you are!”

  Now it was his turn to smile. “They will wonder,” he said. “But they will know me by the words I speak, and by the woman who stands at my side.”

  “There is something else,” she said, almost as if she had not heard him speak. She was listening to some other tune inside her head. “It comes from the Wolf, but it is not of the wolf,” she said. “Something works through him to give us this gift.”

  “Something benign,” he suggested.

  “To us it seems,” Sheyani said, but she looked thoughtful. “The great magics are never wholly good, it is said. There is always balance. There is always a price to pay.”

  64. Ambush

  With Passerina gone their luck seemed to have deserted them. It was against all belief and history, but Seth Yarra had adopted new tactics. From what he understood of them, from everything he had learned from books and been told by Narak, this was quite impossible. They fought according to a book, and the book was sacred, and could not be changed. Yet he was sure that their attackers were Seth Yarra. Who else could they be?

  In the early hours of the morning the alarm had been raised. Two of the guards were dead, killed by arrows. Four other men had been injured, also struck by arrows which had been shot seemingly at random into their camp.

  It was not a serious threat, but it was certainly an annoyance. An hour later the same thing occurred. Perhaps twenty arrows flew in from the dark outside the camp, and from quite a different quarter. This time one man was killed and two injured.

  For all that Skal could do to prevent it a cavalry detachment of Telans galloped off into the night to hunt down men that they could barely hope to find before dawn, and so it proved.

  Less than an hour later there was a third attack, equally trivial, and it failed almost completely in that only one man was slightly injured. Yet Skal wondered if it was a failure at all. Thousands of men milled about in the dark and their officers had to exert themselves to keep even more men from rushing off.

  “We will seek them out in the morning,” Hestia said. She had called her commanders together once more to exhort them to keep their men within the camp.

  “I doubt you will find them,” Skal said. “If you do they will number no more than a couple of hundred.”

  “And how do you know this?” one of the Telans demanded.

  “Because there are no Seth Yarra here but the remnants of the Greenhow garrison. When we passed by on the other bank of the Perit it was clear that their numbers were much reduced. Our scouts have reported no forces abroad that need worry us, and now we are attacked.”

  “So we will seek them out in the morning and destroy them,” the Telan officer insisted.

  “How long will that take you?”

  “No more than an hour,” the man replied confidently.

  Skal shook his head. “By dawn they will be scattered and hidden.”

  “Two hours, then. Four. What does it matter?”

  “A day, perhaps?”

  “Very well. A day.”

  “Or more… So we stay here. They know the land, they have had time to prepare. If they have a good officer, and I’ll wager they have, it will take us three or four days to stop these attacks. How far away is the Seth Yarra force to our south?”

  “They mean to delay us,” Hestia said.

  “They will not catch us,” the Telan officer protested. “They are a week behind.”

  “Lord Skal is right, Garrial,” Hestia said. When we get to the Western Chain we will need time to prepare, and the less time we have, the poorer our defence will be. If these Seth Yarra delay us two days it is two days we cannot afford.”

  “But it is intolerable!” Garrial stormed. “We cannot just sit and comb our hair while these dogs shoot at us!”

  “Nor should we,” Skal said. “Tomorrow we will kill them, but not by chasing them. We will make them chase us and draw them into an ambush.”

  Hestia smiled at this, and Skal knew that his argument was won. For all her faults as a Telan the queen appreciated cleverness over brute aggression, and that was what Skal offered her. He explained his plan. In the morning he would take five hundred of his Avilians ahead of the main column as an advance guard, and he had no doubt that the Seth Yarra wou
ld see them go. He would march through Greenhow, which he was confident was now deserted by the enemy, and take up a concealed position along the line of march beyond the town.

  Hestia would follow with the main force, and the Seth Yarra soldiers would follow her trail. She would clean out anything in Greenhow that was of use and then march through Skal’s positions and make camp again a few miles further up the road. Skal would ambush the Seth Yarra as they followed Hestia. By this plan there would be no delay, and the nuisance raids would be ended.

  Garrial looked at him as though he had conjured a particularly noxious weasel from under his hat. It went against strict Telan notions of honour to indulge in ambush, although they were not above it historically. Skal reflected that as an Avilian lord there would be some Telans who saw everything he did as unsatisfactory in one way or another.