by Tom Stacey
“What?” She did not turn around.
“The men chasing us. Were they rebels?”
Selene lifted her hood from her head but even the sun could not warm her raven-coloured hair. “What have they told you about the war?” she asked over her shoulder. “Did you think it was Illis’ glorious crimson warriors fighting demons?”
“I was told that you were responsible. That the Sons of Iss—”
She spun to face him. “The Sons were not the cause, Loster. The rebels were farmhands and peasants who had taken their fill of requisitions and conscription. Not those things in the forest. I’m not even sure they were men.”
A flurry of movement caught Loster’s eye and he looked up to see a cloud of black birds explode from their forest perches. Selene followed his gaze and then flinched as a low, mournful horn sounded close by.
Very close.
“Oh gods. Aifayne.” Loster broke into a run and shouldered past Selene. She called after him but he ignored her, running headlong through the trees, looking for the telltale flash of white that would betray the priest. He heard a crash in the forest behind him but kept running until he was alone with the sound of his breath and the rush of blood in his ears.
Something caught his eye and he veered towards it, catching his shoulder on a tree and grunting as he felt warm blood bead on his upper arm.
He stepped into a clearing and froze. There was Aifayne, still prostrate, but he was not alone. By his side there knelt a tall figure in dark grey armour that drank in the light. The figure had his back to Loster but his limbs were very thin and he wore a helm of dark grey. Loster could feel his heart hammering against his chest and he was paralysed with indecision. “Aifayne!” he cried out, and the old priest opened his eyes.
And screamed.
Weak as he was, Aifayne tried to get away, but the kneeling warrior reached over and calmly placed a gauntleted hand on his face, pushing him back down.
Loster started forward but the warrior turned and Loster saw his metal face. In an instant, he was transported back to the Widowpeak, and he felt as weak and as helpless as he had all those years before.
The smooth, metal face spoke: a deep, bassy rumble in a language that Loster had never heard before. Though he could not understand the words, it made every organ inside him quiver with unease. The creature stood and turned its whole body towards him. It was over seven feet tall.
Something wrapped around his legs and yanked backwards so that he fell heavily on to his face. He rolled on to his back and saw another of the tall creatures. It had caught him with a rope and was reeling him in as though it was landing a fish. He moaned like a man waking from a nightmare and thrashed around in a vain attempt to escape. The warrior knelt to receive him, reaching out with a barbed hand. As it clutched the front of his tunic it ripped through the fabric and then his flesh. Blood ran warm down his chest and he looked around for Selene, but this time there was nobody to save him.
XV
On the third day, Beccorban allowed them a fire. It was a measly thing of weak flames and wet wood that gave off more smoke than heat but Riella took it as a sign of forgiveness and that was good enough. It was getting warmer as they descended from the mountains, though the nights were still cold and she was not dressed for this kind of weather. She couldn’t even wear the scarf without Beccorban telling her she looked like a Ri’eshi pirate.
She stared at the grizzled warrior now as he dozed against the rock wall. It had stopped raining, and his wisdom held that the layers of clothing kept out the warmth as well as the cold, so he had shed his bearskin and now lay reclined against the flat stone with his hands gathered neatly on his lap and the great hammer within easy reach. His leather tunic was old and cracked but the wet weather had served to soften and shape it, so that now it seemed to fit more comfortably. It covered him from neck to knee and stopped just above his elbows. The sleeves of the woollen tunic he wore underneath reached down to his forearms where they stopped short of covering his wrists. Here he wore vambraces instead, also of boiled leather. Riella had teased him, saying that if his woman made him clothes with sleeves too short he should get a new woman. His face had grown dark at that and he had fallen quiet. She knew she had overstepped, but after an hour of brooding silence, he had made some quip about her scarf and all had been forgotten. As she was learning, Beccorban’s rage was a summer storm: dark and terrible but fleeting, without lingering afterthought.
A small log on the fire split and cracked with a tiny explosion of sparks making her jump. A low chuckle rolled from Beccorban. She scowled and hurled a small round pebble at him. It snicked off the stone above his head and he did not even flinch. He spoke without opening his eyes. “Don’t be so nervous, lass. We’re far from harm here.” He opened one eye and twisted his neck to squint at the powdery scar on the stone that the pebble had left. “Also, you may want to get some rest. It’s affecting your aim.” His closed his eye again.
“My aim is fine, old man,” she snarled and immediately cursed herself for the insult, but he did not seem to notice. She waited a few moments and then decided to cushion the blow. “What’s your secret?”
“You already know enough of my secrets, girl. I don’t care to share any more with you.”
“Stop calling me girl. I’m no girl.”
“Sorry, old men forget sometimes.”
“Gods! You’re impossible!” she cried, yet couldn’t help but feel a flutter of something pleasant in her stomach. Beccorban seemed content to lie as he had been, with his head against the wall, dozing lightly. “I meant how can you sleep so easily? Given what’s happened.”
He sighed loudly and sat forward. “Usually without interruption, but I can see that you’re not going to let me, are you?” He hooked a long stick from the fire with the toe of his boot. The flames shimmered and danced as he poked and stirred them to a frenzy with the wooden limb. “What’s panicking you?”
Riella stared at him, mouth agape. “Kressel is burning!” she pointed vaguely at where they were going.
“Cities burn all the time.” He waved away her incredulous gasps. “What is important is why she is burning, and how. Kressel is not a small city and her defences are peerless in this part of the world, unless you count Ruum and possibly Fend as she was. It is probably an accident.”
“And you believe that?”
“I hope that. With all of my heart.”
“You’re afraid.”
He tilted his head and looked at her. “If Kressel is under attack then you would do well to be afraid too.”
An uncomfortable silence fell on the pair and Riella realised how quiet their rocky eyrie truly was. It was pitch dark and Kressel was a distant glow somewhere below them. She peered into the soupy shadows all around, but the fire had made her night-blind and she would have seen as much had she covered her eyes with her hands. She was suddenly afraid and ached for the soothing rumble of Beccorban’s voice, but he sat in grim silence with his long, powerful arms draped over his knees, the stick-poker held loosely between one thick finger and a crooked thumb. She noted how he never looked directly at the flames, his cool, wintery gaze always directed at some point behind or to the side of them.
“Do you always see things so simply?” she asked.
He considered before he answered. “It helps when you’re a soldier, and that’s all I have ever been.” She felt sad at his tone. “I never learned to plant crops or grow things like other men. My father always told me that was for the weak. ‘Sheep sow and wolves reap,’ he used to say, though now that I think about it, I can’t recall seeing many sheep tilling fields.”
She laughed and his face brightened, his scowl smoothing into a wry, distant smile and allowing the fire to spill across his features with an orange glow, so that to her he looked like some great benevolent god cast in bronze. “Did you love your father?” she asked.
“No, lass. Few did. Brennan was not a man much given to love. He taught me to kill and he did that well,
but everything else I had to learn for myself.” His voice grew quieter. “He was a pugilist, you see.”
“A what?”
“A pugilist, a man who fights with his fists for money.”
“Just money?” she asked archly.
“What else is there?” he said, grinning.
“Honour, duty, family, love.” She numbered the list on her fingers.
“Psshht. Men don’t fight for love, they fight for what’s theirs.”
“What about Capito? He fought for love.” Capito was a hero from the old stories. He had travelled across all of Daegermund to free his beloved Irridice from the foul warlock, Fiego. Riella knew the story from a poem her mother had read to her when she was young, and even as an adult she had a warm place in her heart for such stories. Yet now she felt her cheeks grow warm. She had made herself seem something less: a little girl.
Beccorban shook his head. “Capito the Red was not fighting for love. Irridice was stolen from him. He wanted her back because she was his; that he loved her is just a detail. Also, Fiego took his horse — a damned fine one if the story is true. Capito wanted it back.”
“Stolen?” Riella’s cheeks grew warmer still, though this time they flushed with the rosy hue of anger. “Irridice could not be ‘stolen.’ She is not a horse. The horse was an afterthought, otherwise the story is meaningless. A man cannot love a horse.”
Beccorban pointed the glowing end of his makeshift fire poker at her. “That,” he said, “depends entirely upon the horse.”
“Gods, it’s like arguing with a stone.” Riella huffed in frustration and folded her arms across her modest bosom.
“And like stone, men never change, but they can have many faces. Which side you see depends on where you’re standing.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll tell you a story,” he began, shifting to find a more comfortable position. “I remember a siege in Otelune back in 1221—”
“Where’s that?”
“Over the sea.” He waved a hand. “It does not matter. Anyway, it was a long siege. They held out for three months and we were beginning to run out of food.”
“What did you do?”
“Me? Very little, if truth be told. I was young and very foolish — but that is not the story. One of our number found a postern gate that was unguarded one night and we took the city with fire and steel. A city that had held us for three months broke in three minutes, and we were loosed upon the people inside. Wolves in the sheep pen. That night I saw all manner of terrible things — I even did some myself — but one moment has stuck with me all these years, and I will carry the image to my grave.
“There were four men from my group, and they had captured a little girl. She could not have been any older than five summers. Her parents had been put to the sword and the men were throwing her around from person to person, as though she were a ragdoll. Suddenly one of them grabbed her and lifted up her dress. He bent her over his knee and began to smack her on the buttocks with the flat of his blade. The girl was crying like nothing I have ever heard, yet the men, all of them fathers and husbands, were in hysterics, as though it were the funniest thing they had ever seen.”
“Did you stop them?”
He twisted his mouth to the side. “No, lass. I didn’t. I sometimes wish I had, but there were four of them, and the girl was their spoils, and I had spoils of my own to collect.”
“Were any of them little girls?”
He shook his head. “No. That has never been for me.”
“So what was the point of your little story?” she spat, strangely angry at this man she barely knew.
“That love is relative, I suppose. Armies cannot fight for love because they don’t all love the same things. Men fight because it suits them. Greed, revenge, hate. These are things to fight for.”
“Do you only fight for money, then?”
“That was true, I suppose. Before Illis.”
“What’s it like killing a man for money?” she spat, angry at herself but too riled to control it.
“I should think it’s similar to killing a man for anything, but then I am not talking to the uninitiated, am I?”
Riella’s breath died in her throat and she strained for a response. “What do you mean?”
“Come now, lass. I’ve met enough killers of men before to know one when I see one. You may be the one sticking them, but the blade scars you too.” She stared at her hands, folded in her lap. “First kill?” She nodded. “Did he die well?”
“He choked on his own blood.” Though she spoke quietly, she was surprised at the venom that seeped into her words and hardened her voice. It felt good to let some of the poison out. “He made a noise like a clogged gutter and then he suffocated and I watched him die. It took a long time.” She looked up at Beccorban and thought she saw a glimmer of concern — or was it respect? — flicker there before that wall of impassivity came down again. “Is that dying well?”
Beccorban smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “There’s no such thing, really. I’ve never understood the phrase. Some go bravely and quietly, some plead, others lay down and curl up in a ball like a kitten, but they all die in the end and it’s never pretty or glorious like your songs say. They all shit themselves, for one.”
“Mine didn’t.”
“He would have eventually. It’s the muscles relaxing. It just happens.” Silence came again, but this time it was a comfortable silence accompanied by the pops and crackles of the fire.
“Will somebody save Kressel?” asked Riella, knowing what she wished the answer to be.
"Perhaps. Illis is not a man to sit and do nothing. He has that one virtue at least.”
“You knew him?” she knew she should ask him about Kressel but the thought of the city burning made her stomach turn. She sought to turn the conversation elsewhere.
“Of course. I helped to make him, much to my shame.”
“He’s a good Empron,” Riella said petulantly.
“Is he? I thought he would be. We all did.” Riella raised an eyebrow for him to continue and he looked at her, then blew his breath out through pursed lips. “I met Illis when we were both young men. I had crossed the Scoldsee to Elios to join a mercenary band there.”
“Why?”
“Because I was young and wanted glory and fortune, as all young men do. None of us have the wits to know that glory comes hard, or that once you have it, it’s already lost its colour. Veria was still very much under the thumb of Respin in those days.” His face distorted into an evil-looking grimace and Riella shuddered. “It made me sick to watch them preen and prance and spit on us.”
“Is that the only reason?” She was amazed that this man could have started as so many others did: a disillusioned youth.
“What else was I to do?” Beccorban said defensively, stirring the fire back to life with the stick. “Join the Higard? Become one of them?”
“Others did,” she said.
“Ah, well, Bellephon only went in because he was a criminal. He killed a man in a tavern over a woman, and the Lord of Darkmist offered him the army or an axe in the neck. He made the only choice he could.”
“But Bellephon was a hero,” she said meekly. It felt as though the great Bellephon Hammerfist had lost his golden aura now that she knew he was a simple criminal.
“Aye, a hero, but only after he changed sides — changed to the winning side, mind. Ask a Respini what they think of the Hammerfist. Over there his name is mud.” She knew she was wearing her disappointment on her face and Beccorban must have noticed for he softened his tone. “It doesn’t make him any less of a hero, Riella. If he hadn’t held Ruum, the rebellion would have died before it began. It’s just important to remember that not everyone sees things the way you do. Your heroes are yours alone, like your gods.”
He had called her by her name. He never did that. “And what of you?” Riella asked in a small voice. “Are you a hero?”
Beccorban laughed. “I’
m no hero, lass. Haven’t you heard? I am the Helhammer and I am damned.”
“What did you do?”
Beccorban pulled the stick from the flames and held it up so that the glowing tip hovered a few inches from his face. He blew softly and it glowed white hot, carving deep orange-limned shadows into the contours of his face. “A man once said to me that everyone has a demon in them. It tells you to do things sometimes that you wouldn’t normally do, and you have to keep it in check, because if you don’t, people die.” He fell silent.
“Did you let your demon out?” she prompted him.
He shook his head. “I never said I believed him, did I? I don’t have a demon. I made the decisions I did because I wanted to.”
“And what happened?” she asked.
“People died.”
She closed her eyes.
“I have told you enough about me for one night, lass. Let’s hear about you. Why do you want to join the Temple Dawn?”
She pictured the dawn priestess that she had seen in Lanark, how radiant and happy she had been, how men of all stations had bowed and scraped at her feet and fallen over each other just to get a glimpse of her. The famous Temple Dawn in Kressel was probably gone now, melted down into rubble. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Was it the man you killed? What did he do?”
She smiled mirthlessly and looked up at him, trying to match that icy gaze with eyes that threatened to brim over with tears born of guilt. “He tried to take something that wasn’t his, and I fought for it.”
