by Tom Stacey
To her surprise, Beccorban laughed. “You are a dangerous woman, Riella. Remember that. Nothing can hurt you if you don’t let it.”
“And you?” she asked. “Are you as dangerous as people say?”
“Oh, I’m worse than that, lass. I’m Death itself.”
The forests grew thinner as they descended from the Dantus, and though the weather did not improve much, the rain held off. Beccorban looked behind him to make sure Riella was keeping up. She was wearing that cursed scarf again.
“Not much further,” he called out. “Another day perhaps, if it stays dry.”
“Won’t you be recognised?” said Riella, hopping over a rock and skidding down a muddy slope.
“Huh?”
“In Kressel. Won’t people know you?”
He reached out and offered his hand for support as she got closer. Her skin was dry and cool, and despite himself he felt the quickening of spirit that passes between two people. Gods, man, she is young enough to be your daughter! He eased her down to his level and turned away, striding on as though to distance himself from her charms. “I don’t think that will be a problem,” he called over his shoulder. “There are few who would know me by sight. Illis maybe, though I doubt I will be awarded an audience with the Empron.”
“What if they saw the hammer?” she asked.
Beccorban frowned. “Kreyiss,” he said.
“What?”
“That is her name, Kreyiss.” He looked over his shoulder at her.
“You gave your hammer a name?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.
“I did not give her a name,” he snapped. “She had a name when she came to me.”
“She?” The mockery in her voice splashed acid on his anger.
“I will not speak to you of things you do not understand.” He accelerated through the trees and tried to ignore the tinkling sound of her laughter behind him.
He focused on the forest in front of him. Soon the trees would end and they would be left exposed and in the open. He had planned to take the coast road, a finely built stone highway raised above the surrounding plains. It served as the main link between Kressel and Vendal, the small nation south of Veria famed for its merchants and their wealth. However, the smoke on the horizon meant that the coast road was no longer safe. He could not imagine who would attack Veria’s second city. Whoever it was would soon face the might of the Dremon, and Beccorban knew what those grim men could do. Indeed, he had helped create them.
Maybe it was just a fire. Kressel was a port city after all and its seafront was full of old wooden warehouses, each holding bountiful cargo: bales of silk, timber from Flen and Rindell — the riches of an empire, taken or traded from a hundred nations in Daegermund and beyond. Any one of them could have caught light. Such a fire would billow black smoke into the sky, visible for miles.
But deep down he knew it was not a fire — not an accidental one anyway. He had watched a city burn before. Besides, Kressel had precautions against such things: a group of city watchmen tasked with carrying water in huge sealed carriages to any stricken areas. Beccorban and Riella had been travelling for two days now, and still the heavens were scarred with plumes of cloud tainted with smoke. Kressel was dying but he could not think who was killing her.
He was only thankful he was too far away to hear the screams.
Riella hugged her arms about her body and winced as her hand ached. It had swollen badly but luckily nothing was broken. The weather kept her mind on other things than the pain. Her clothes were still damp from the rainfall, though if she squeezed hard enough she could stop herself from shivering. She had learned long ago that a good remedy for discomfort was distraction.
She took a deep breath and stumbled on. For so long now, ever since her flight from Kaleni and the wardens of Lanark, Kressel and its famed Temple Dawn had been her guiding beacon, her hope on the horizon. Now, if her eyes were to be believed, it was a city aflame. Her beacon had become a macabre witchlight that promised only death, and yet still she was driven towards it, compelled by pride or morbid curiosity — or both. She looked up again at Beccorban’s great bearskin, shining black as if oiled and swishing back and forth along the ground as it swayed with the arrogant roll of his shoulders. Maybe it was him? Maybe he was driving her on? She was content to let that be it and give full responsibility for the journey to him. That way it would hurt less when she saw what had become of her dreams.
Ahead of her, Beccorban slowed to a halt and held out an arm to bar her progress. Pointedly she stepped around to his other side and glared at the side of his head. She would not be controlled, damn him. The fact that he did not seem to notice only provoked her further.
“Look there,” he spoke softly, pointing out through the rapidly thinning forest to a blue-grey smudge where the land met the sky.
“Is that…?” she began, curiosity taking a firm hold over the warring emotions in her head.
“Yes, the Scoldsee,” he said. “Another two hundred paces and we shall be out in the open until Kressel.”
The land fell away before them, shedding the last few bare trees and folding in ever shallower ripples of sickly brown and grey-green grass towards the sea. From here it looked about waist height but it was hard to tell. Though they were still in the foothills, the city was marked by a darker patch of sky that hung over it like a great black spider pregnant with malice, the myriad chimneys of choking fume its legs. To Riella it was a scream building in her head.
Beccorban grunted and continued as though he could not see the evidence of Kressel’s fate. “We must travel fast and stay low.” He looked at her as if sizing her up, and she could not help but blush. The rain had made her clothing cling to her like a second skin, and under the borrowed cloak that she held closed at the neck, it left little to the imagination.
Beccorban pulled off his bearskin and began to wring it out, twisting the last moisture from the heavy fur with fingers like curled iron. Satisfied, he slipped it back on and took another appraising look at her. “Good thing you chose to dress like a man. In skirts, the grass would cut you to ribbons.”
Riella pulled her thin fur cloak about her tighter and scowled behind her scarf. Dress like a man! Says the person wearing the clothes of a bear.
“You know, if you’re going to join the Temple Dawn, you might want to consider getting yourself something more appropriate. A dawn priestess would call you brazen if she—”
“I’m well aware of what they would say,” she cut him off. She brushed a fallen lock of dark gold hair from her forehead and looked out at the wilderness in front of them. She did not want to speak of her plans to anybody. Even hearing her ambitions out loud made them seem soiled somehow.
She spotted a ribbon of pale against pale, a winding grey worm that slid towards Kressel from the south. “What’s that?”
“The coast road,” he said grimly. “We need to follow it but we cannot travel on it. We have no idea what walks it these days. Come, let us go.” He stepped forward into the shade of the last few trees between her and the ashes of her dreams.
“Stay down,” hissed Beccorban, pressing his weight on her so that she was sandwiched between the rubbery muscle of his chest and the damp grass. Riella struggled to breathe and just managed to fill her lungs before the big man clapped a large, calloused hand over her mouth. She felt panic threaten but she ignored it and breathed out slowly past the mask his fingers made.
She had not seen what he had seen but his reaction had been so quick that she wouldn’t have had time to move anyway. Now he lay atop her in a shallow ditch some three hundred paces from the coast road, hiding her from she knew not what. As she lay there accompanied only by the sound of his hot breath in her ear, she toyed with the idea that this was a clumsy attempt to rut with her. Then as she felt his heartbeat quicken against her own and remembered the cloud of smoke in the distance, she dismissed such nonsense. This man, a complete stranger days before, was protecting her. Every now and then as his boots slid
in the mud, he leant into her to flatten them both against the wall of their hiding place. Even then there was no lust in him, no telling hardness in the part of him that pushed against her stomach. Riella cursed herself for a fool and strained her ears to listen.
At first she could hear nothing but the light wind that carved foam from the distant Scoldsee and the sound of Beccorban’s breathing. Despairing, she turned her head to the side, and in so doing her ear came into contact with the earth. Then she heard it.
Doom doom, doom doom, doom doom. The harsh metallic rhythm of armoured soldiers marching in perfect step. Doom doom, doom doom, doom doom. She flicked her eyes up to Beccorban but he was peering over the edge of the ditch and his face was grim.
They stayed like that for an hour while the hellish staccato stamped past. The mud seeped through her breeches, and the small of her back grew wet and uncomfortable where her cloak had gotten trapped beneath her. Were it not for Beccorban’s warmth, she would have been shivering. She found his weight strangely comforting, and the woodsmoke smell of him reminded her of something she should have known, a fatherly smell. However, before long the muscles of her neck burned with fatigue, whilst cramp drove its cruel knives into the meat of her legs. She drew in a shuddering breath to protest but just then Beccorban rolled off of her.
“They’re gone,” he said simply and stared after them towards the dark cloud on the horizon.
Riella pulled herself up and stretched her legs, rubbing at the sore muscles and glowering at her erstwhile shelter. “Who were they?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’ve never seen their like before. We need to get closer.”
They walked in silence, cold and miserable and haunted. If I had any sense I would have stayed in the Dantus, thought Beccorban. Green boys in crimson armour make for better foes than those that walk the coast road. Twice more they had hidden from groups of strange soldiers, all marching towards Kressel.
Beccorban thought again of those dark grey helms and the unnaturally tall men that wore them. Each was well over half as tall as him again, and he was considered a large man in most parts. The soldiers had been weirdly lean, each clad in dark grey plate armour that neither shone nor sparkled in the wan light that filtered through clouds heavy with death. At first Beccorban had thought his eyes were playing him false, old organs playing games on an old mind. However, once he had seen their prisoner, he knew he still had his wits. Blood did not lie.
The lead soldier carried a thin silver chain that ended in a collar looped around the neck of what had once been a man. They had taken his arms, and black gore stained the sides of his body. Tattered flesh hung from the stumps that waggled as he walked, like the stubby wings of a newborn bird. Beccorban had been far enough from the road to remain unseen but the wind had carried the wretched man’s choked moans and whimpers to his ears, so that he was sure that they must have taken the prisoner’s tongue.
Not men. He had seen men do similar or worse to their own kind but the armless man provided him with a simple height comparison that fed his unease. For it confirmed what he had come to suspect. He was suddenly remembering a very tall man in a clearing in the forest, a mournful face with pale blue skin, high cheekbones, red-tinted eyes, and sharply pointed ears. What had the stranger said? “Run, for they are coming…”
It seemed they were already here.
A great restless terror awoke behind Becorban’s eyes and he felt sick. If these soldiers were an invasion force, then what would become of Veria, his home? No, he thought, not just Veria. The world of men.
And it had begun with Kressel.
Beccorban looked behind him to check that Riella was keeping up. She trudged along, head down and arms folded protectively against the cold. He had no comfort to offer her. If his fears were founded, then the gods only knew what fate awaited them. He spat. The gods have abandoned us. They did long ago.
A smell carried to them on the salt breeze from the sea. It was a rank, fetid smell, laced with the acrid tang of smoke. It was a smell Beccorban knew well, but Riella did not and it made her gag. He shushed her too harshly and crested a fold in the land, grabbing a handful of the insipid grass to haul himself up. He crouched so as not to silhouette himself against the bright sky and looked upon the ruin of an Empire.
In all of Daegermund there was no city like Kressel. On the shore sat the Outer Fortress, famed for its high Land Walls. Yet this was only the doorway, for the main city lay on an island that emerged like a grey-green kraken from the steel-grey waters of the Scoldsee. It was joined to the Outer Fortress on the mainland by the Long Bridge, a thin stretch of white stone supported by huge legs of the same colour that grew from beneath the waves in great pointed arches. But Kressel’s greatest and most famous feature were its huge Sea Walls. They were curved on the landward side, but on the sides that faced the water, they raced to meet each other in a point as sharp as the prow of a ship. However, on the southern side, the wall had a longer race to run, bowing out in a great encircling arm that encompassed the entrance to the main harbour. The wall was broken up at regular intervals by tall cylindrical towers that kept watch on the implacable sea. Kressel had always been a marvel to behold, but now she was broken.
The Outer Fortress looked more or less untouched, as did the Long Bridge, but behind the Sea Walls of the main city there lay a pall of dark vapour from the hundreds of fires burning within. Beccorban felt his mouth go dry as he saw that the great Harbour Wall of the main city, unbreached for three hundred years, lay sundered and half fallen into the sea, so that the iron-coloured waters crashed against the white stone with a rhythmic boom. Even this far from the city, he could hear the screams and other less than human sounds. They had been marching towards the burning city for days, but Kressel was vast: a sprawling mass of stone anchored to the eastern shores of Veria. A sack could last for weeks if unchecked.
Beccorban had forgotten about Riella, but looked at her now as she gasped in horror and covered her mouth with her hands. “Come, we must not be seen here,” he said and made to slip back behind the fold in the land. He followed the line of the ridge upon which they stood and saw how it grew westwards and then north before dipping back into the flat landscape under a blanket of trees. If he could use its bulk as a screen, they might be able to skirt the city and come out someplace north of it by nightfall. It was their only option. Night’s darkness would not visit the open ground before the walls until the fires inside the city were quenched.
“No, wait,” she said and he turned in surprise as she tugged on his elbow and pointed.
Kressel’s Outer Fortress had two gates, and the southernmost, known as the Wandering Gate, lay cracked and leaning drunkenly on iron hinges that some unholy fire had twisted out of shape. As Beccorban watched, three small figures — mere specks at this distance — broke from cover and ran out on to the patchy grass that ringed the city.
“They’re not soldiers,” said Riella.
“No, lass.” He watched them move towards the trees west of the city. It was clear they were running but they had too much ground to cover and their progress over the sandy ground seemed agonisingly slow. Beccorban stood with Riella, transfixed by the little drama playing out below then. She breathed in sharply.
“Oh no,” she pointed, and Beccorban, conscious that they were not exactly hidden, followed her gaze nonetheless.
From the shattered Wandering Gate rode one of the tall soldiers that he had seen on the coast road. The soldier was armoured like a knight, as the others had been, except atop his helm there were several long metal protrusions that resembled the antlers of a proud stag. He was too far away to make out specific details, but from the casual arrogance of the way he trotted forward, his intentions were clear. However, strangest of all was what he rode. Beccorban had never seen anything like it: the creature was very long and low to the ground like a lizard, yet its body was feathered, with a vicious looking tail at one end and the long-necked head of a giant bird, complete with a cruel, hook
ed beak, on the other.
“What in gods’ name…” Riella began but she didn’t finish, for the knight kicked his mount into a canter and began to close on the three small figures. “Do you think they’ll—”
“Don’t watch,” said Beccorban harshly, for he had a soldier’s knowledge and knew that cavalry, however oddly mounted, could eat up distance in the blink of an eye. He tried to pull her away from the crest but she fought him and he turned away. He had seen how this played out many times before.
A shriek cut across the plain and Beccorban resisted the urge to cover his ears. It was a horrible sound that plucked at the nerves and ran cold fingers up his spine. He thought that the strange bird creature had made it but could not be certain. Despite himself he turned back to the action. The runners on the plain had seen their pursuer and somehow doubled their pace. They were close to the dense trees now and Riella said in a hopeful voice, “They’re going to make it!”
Maybe they will, he thought, then cold logic seeped back into his brain and he knew that even if they did it would not matter. If Kressel had fallen then the whole coastline was open. It was a matter of time.
As if at a signal, a column of eerily tall soldiers broke from the trees to the west. They marched in perfect formation, stalking towards the city on long legs. Behind them came a disordered mass of humanity driven forward by more soldiers. Prisoners, he thought, being led back to the second city for a purpose he did not want to imagine.
Riella raised her hand to her mouth and chewed nervously on her fingertips. Upon seeing his comrades, the antler-helmed soldier on the bird-lizard slowed his pace, as if to toy with his victims.
“We have to help them!” cried Riella, and Beccorban hissed at her to be quiet. They were not far enough away to speak so carelessly, although if Antler Helm had heard them, he showed no sign of it. Instead he and his feathered creature were intent on their prey.
