He was standing close by, arm in a sling, watching not the winning of the prize they had come so far to claim but the Clamour. He was right. It was lumbering along the track towards the village. Closer now, Drann could see its distorted, cankered face. The growths and pits that marred its blotched skin. The hugeness of it, arms like tree trunks punching down, shoulders like barrels.
He began to back away. They all did. But the Clamour slowed. It faltered. Sank down. It dropped its head and grew still. Silence descended. Drann could hear a bird singing, somewhere high up in the sky.
Akrana brought the Bereaved and a prisoner into the village. The Permanence had a heavy cloak over it and about it. Yulan could see pale skin, though. Naked, wasted legs. It was such a small thing. So fearfully small, to be the cause and object of such terrible slaughter. To have held an empire at bay for so many years.
The prisoner was not a warrior. He had fine features, and a slight build. A Clever, Yulan supposed. Who now slept. Akrana laid him out on the floor of one of the barns. The Bereaved sat beside him. Pliant and inert. Yulan wondered if he should fear it, and perhaps fly from its very presence. It had killed thousands in its time, after all. Far more, many times more, than the Clamour ever had. It was the very embodiment of plague and pestilence, the stuff of which those afflictions were made. Yet it sat there and did nothing and seemed no more frightful than a harmless, maimed child. He could not fear it, because of that and because a strange sort of elation was filling him. A giddiness, as of a man suddenly allowed to breathe after holding mouth and nose shut for too long.
“Kasuman,” Akrana said to him, flicking a contemptuous finger at the slumbering Clever. “I found him with the Bereaved, hiding behind that tree out there. Whispering in its ear, so I thought it best he should sleep. I was inclined to kill him, but that might be for you to choose.”
Looking at her now, Yulan saw that her face was tight with concentration and effort.
“Keep him asleep,” he said. “Can you do that?”
“For as long as you like. It is not hard.”
He was not certain how much faith to put in that claim.
“It might be we’ll be bargaining with the School, now we hold the Bereaved,” he said. “Perhaps Kasuman can be a part of that. Perhaps they’ll want him too. Keep them well separated, though. I’ll have Rudran and Lebid watch over the Bereaved in one of the cottages. They both of them need to stay still and quiet for a while in any case.”
Yulan rubbed his eyes and rolled his shoulders. They felt loose. His next thought put a cord of tightness back into them, though.
“But we need to deal with Callotec first,” he said.
Callotec was just as he had appeared when last Yulan saw him. Subdued, now, with none of his bluster to create the illusion of authority. Someone who did not know his name would not have guessed him to be a man of such consequence, Yulan suspected. Yet the loathing and contempt that Yulan felt welling up inside him, chasing away all that earlier elation, said he must be of consequence, somehow.
He stood in the centre of the village, with the six men who had been beside him to the very last. All of them had been stripped of sword and shield and helmet. They stood in grim silence, facing twelve of the Free. Archers, lancers, Hamdan and Yulan and Akrana all stood in a single line, staring at Callotec. Drann was not there, Yulan noticed. He looked around, and saw the contract-holder standing some way further back, his hand absently resting on the parchment case at his belt that had begun all this.
“I suppose I should be honoured, to have so many of the Free gathered here on my account,” the last of the Hommetic line said sneeringly.
“Honour has nothing to do with it,” Yulan said.
“No? Well, perhaps you are correct.” Callotec shrugged. “We always had different ideas about the meaning of honour, you and I. Do you think you’ve finally won, Captain of the Free?”
“No,” said Yulan. “But I think you’ve finally lost.”
He regarded the six Armsmen who stood alongside Callotec. One or two of them looked afraid.
“You men can go,” Yulan said. “We don’t need you.”
They hesitated. Doubt was in their eyes.
“Go!” Hamdan shouted, brandishing his arms, and they were off like hares.
Because Yulan knew the archer as well as he did any man in the world, he could hear the fury in that cry and knew its target. The guilt and hatred that had brought the Free to this moment were not Yulan’s alone. They never had been.
“Get back here!” Callotec howled after the disappearing warriors, but no one was listening to him. Not any more.
The six men scattered over the battlefield, scavenging horses, riding off. None of them looked back. Callotec glared after them in barely suppressed rage. His shoulders shook, just a little. There was a tear at the corner of his eye, Yulan noticed. He could not tell whether it was born of anger, or fear, or disbelief. Eventually, the Dog-Lord turned back and faced his captors. He folded his arms across his chest.
“I do not fear you,” he said.
Yulan did not believe that. He looked at the beaten man and found it ever harder, with each passing heartbeat, to summon up that loathing he had once thought limitless, eternal. Callotec was spent, and could hurt no one now.
“Do you regret what you’ve done?” Yulan asked him quietly.
Callotec frowned at him.
“Regret?”
“Never mind. Tie his hands. We’ll take him back to Creel.”
“No!’ cried Callotec as soon as Hamdan took a step forward to do as he was bid. “I will not go back to Armadell-on-Lake. If I do, they will make a spectacle, or gaming piece, of me and one day they will torture me to death. Perhaps cut me up into parts, as they did my cousin, and spike each of those parts above some city gate. No!”
“We have a contract,” Yulan said wearily. He was terribly tired of this man now. This small man who had for too long cast such a shadow over Yulan’s life, over the village in which he now stood. “You go to Creel of Mondoon. I do not know or care what he will do with you, beyond the fact that you are most likely right: it will not be gentle, in the end.”
“Do you not care? You lie!’ spat Callotec. “You always cared too much, didn’t you, brown-skin? That’s why you’re here now, because you never did learn that what’s done cannot be undone, and you never could bear the thought of the tide bringing me back…”
Hamdan’s sword was in his hand. He rushed forward, raising the blade and reaching with it for Callotec’s neck. The Dog-Lord would have died then, and none was more surprised than Yulan that it was he who prevented it. He caught Hamdan’s arm and held it. There was a passing instant of struggle between the archer’s ire and Yulan’s certainty, as Callotec shrank away from the two of them. Then Hamdan yielded.
“There’s none shares the instinct more than me,” Yulan said quietly to his friend, “but when it comes to it, I find I’d not have the last deed of the Free, under their last contract, be the petty vengeance of killing a beaten man who has no means of defending himself.”
Hamdan settled his sword back into its sheath. He averted his eyes from Callotec, regarding the dry dust beneath his feet.
“Let his blood lie on the hands of others, if that is what they want,” Yulan breathed. “I think I’ll walk away from here a little taller, knowing that at the last, we chose to keep our hands unmarred. We have done what we came to do. Let that be enough.”
“As you wish,” Hamdan said, almost tenderly, and he turned and walked away.
36
And Still They Came
If the Bereaved was unsettling rather than frightful to be close to, it seemed to Drann that the Clamour was nothing less than appalling. Its wagon had been laboriously brought down into the village, but the great Permanence could not yet be returned to its cage, since Hestin still fought for the control without which there could be no safety for any of them.
Her cloak, the beacon of her strength and token of the sur
ety with which she held the beast, was brown. The edges of its leaves were curling. It teetered upon the verge of disintegration. The old woman who was not old knelt before the Clamour, out on the path through the fields. Yulan knelt beside her, murmuring to her. Drann stood a short distance behind her.
Close enough to feel the Clamour’s heat. Hear its heavy, grinding breathing. Close enough to understand for the first time just how massive it was. It was hunched down, yet still huge. Its head was turned slightly to one side, so that he could see some part of its face. Mucus hung in strands from flat, open nostrils. Saliva trailed from a lipless mouth studded with black, broken teeth.
Its skin was nowhere smooth. It was strewn with humps and hollows. Studded with great boil-like pustules as if the fury within seeped out and corrupted its hide.
“He sinks,” Drann heard Hestin say faintly. “Sleeps. Small.”
Yulan straightened and stretched his back.
“Come away,” he told Drann, and led him back towards the village. “She’ll walk it in when she can. We all need rest now. It’s been hard to come by of late.”
“Why does she call it ‘he’ all the time?” Drann asked as they walked along the track. As he had asked before, and had had no answer.
“Because her father made it,” Yulan said simply. “He died making it. She thinks it her last connection to him. She thinks herself bound to protect the world against it.”
“But it’s not him.”
“No. He’s dead. It’s the Aestival. That’s all. That’s more than enough.”
Drann did sleep, eventually. In a bed in one of the cottages, which the villagers told him he could have. They had wanted to send to bring their families back out of hiding, but Yulan had forbidden it.
“Not until we’re gone,” he had said. “Tomorrow we’ll be away, and you can have this place back. Tonight, there are Permanences here, and they’re neither of them safe.”
That was what he had said. But Drann caught the scent of other cares, other intents. Callotec was here, bound and secured in one of the houses, and the men of Towers’ Shadow knew it. They wanted the man’s life, and for reasons Drann did not fully understand, Yulan thought it better that their captive should live. He had somehow persuaded those few villagers still here of the wisdom in mercy, but surely could not be certain of his ability to sway four or five times as many.
So – whatever the reasons – there remained a multitude of empty houses, empty beds. Drann lay in the one he had been given, and closed his eyes and saw, endlessly, the face of the man he had impaled.
Thick eyebrows, with flecks of grey. He had been about the same age as Drann’s father, whose spear had been in his belly. Moles beside his mouth. A faint scar running up one side of his nose. Brown eyes. Drann could not have recalled the eye colour of any but a handful of the people he had met in his life. Yet he would never forget that this man had brown eyes.
Had he not been utterly exhausted, tired in a deadening way unlike anything he had felt before, these visions would have kept him from sleep all through the night. His weariness overcame even that, and at last sent him into a dreamless sleep.
He was woken by light streaming in through a window, for he had not thought to close any shutters. He could tell by the quality and strength of that light that dawn was long gone. Swinging his legs round and over the edge of the bed, he found himself to be more renewed, more refreshed than he had felt in a long time. He yawned and stretched. Outside the window, he could hear chickens clucking and pecking. That sound put a smile on his face with its simple familiarity.
Outside, Hamdan was grooming the horses, which were neatly lined up. Some were already saddled. Further down the track stood the Clamour’s wagon. Drann was surprised, and slightly alarmed, to see that the Permanence was still not caged. It sat there by the wagon, Hestin next to it. Her cloak had recovered some of its green hue, though. She had mastered the beast.
“What’s happening?” Drann asked Hamdan, stretching again.
“Yulan’ll be telling us that once he’s decided.” Hamdan nodded to one of the nearby houses. “Him and Akrana are talking it out now. They’ll dig up an idea or two, no doubt.”
“Back to Creel?” suggested Drann.
Hamdan snorted, combing away vigorously at a bay horse’s hide.
“Oh, no. You really think life’s so easy? No, there’s the small matter of finding out where we stand with the School. Finding out whether we’re still in a war, and how we might win it.”
That dulled Drann’s humour somewhat. He wandered across to the well and splashed water on his face. Lebid and another of the archers were there, filling water skins.
“Lazy-a-bed,” Lebid taunted Drann good-naturedly.
“I’d be lazy-a-bed every day for the rest of my life if I could,” Drann said.
“Boy’s a sage,” Lebid smiled.
There was a tiny splinter of guilt under Drann’s conscience, in truth. He was the last by a long way to rise. Everyone seemed ready to leave at a moment’s notice, save him.
He made his way back to his bed, and began to roll up and bind the blankets. One of the villagers, the youngest of those who had fought alongside him, appeared in the doorway. Drann looked up and nodded to him. The youth returned the gesture but said nothing. Satisfied with the state of his bedding, Drann straightened. His belt was digging into his side, so he loosened it and rebuckled it.
“Who’re they?” the youth at the door asked.
“Who’re who?” Drann said without looking round. He could not get the case holding Creel’s contract to close properly. It had taken a blow of some sort during the fighting, and the damage left it loose. He found that more annoying than was reasonable.
“Them up there,” the youth said.
Drann glanced at him, just a little irritated. More with the case than the villager. Who was pointing up at the ridge beyond the Old Threetower Road, over which Drann had ridden into Towers’ Shadow. Upon which the Clamour had appeared to save them. Drann went to lean out of the doorway and look up there. He frowned.
There were perhaps twenty or thirty riders on the skyline, strung out in a long line. Then more. More and more figures appearing, extending that line further along the ridge’s crest. Thickening it as they filled in gaps. Drann stood up.
“Who d’you think they are?” asked the youth again, all curiosity.
Curiosity was not what Drann felt. He felt sick. A hundred, he thought. And still they came. He stumbled out into the road, almost tripping as he went. Two hundred. With a blue hint to many of their tunics. Still coming. He spun about and ran for the cottage where Yulan and Akrana were in discussion. He was almost knocked down by Yulan himself, bursting out through the doorway with Kerig cradled in his arms.
“The School…” Drann stammered, pointing.
Yulan ignored him.
“Run!’ he cried. “Ride, those who can. All of you to the Kingshouse! Take nothing but what you hold. Run!”
37
Fools
The Kingshouse had not been made to house many men. In its dilapidated state, its capacities were still further reduced. All but the most irretrievably rotten of the floorboards had been torn up and carried away. The rooms, just two to each floor, were damp and cobwebbed. There were holes in the walls.
Rudran, drifting in and out of consciousness, Kerig and Hestin were stowed away on the uppermost of the three floors. Kasuman slumbered alone below that, with Akrana watching over him from the parapet outside. And on that parapet, laid out on the flagstones at her feet, was Callotec. Bound and gagged. Yulan had told her – softly, with no one else to hear – to kill the man at the last, if the day was lost.
He felt diminished by that command. It had taken no small will to save Callotec from Hamdan’s wrath, and the even more just wrath of the people of Towers’ Shadow; yet he had not hesitated to set constraints, and limits, upon that salvation. He could not countenance the possibility of Callotec outliving the Free, or worse yet some
how escaping captivity entirely through ruse or treachery or guile. The man must go to Creel, or die. Yulan could conceive of no other outcome. He had led people to their deaths – some already met, some most likely soon to come – and Callotec was somewhere at the root of that. The cause of it. And the sense-summoning answer to it. Wasn’t he?
At the foot of the keep, the Clamour waited. Yulan very much feared that he might need it. Already, it was restless, shifting and snuffling in its leadenly titanic way. That did not bode well.
The Bereaved was hidden away in a corner of the tiny, crude stable – nothing more than a sloping roof held up by wooden struts, in truth – crammed in amongst the few horses the Free had managed to get to the Kingshouse. More had slipped their grasp in the confusion and haste.
Yulan had known when he sent everyone rushing to this tiny fortress that the Clamour’s wagon would not pass through the narrow gate in its encircling wall. They had carried the Clamour up here in its cage, Hestin driving the bull faster and harder over that short distance than ever she had before, and then abandoned cage, wagon and bull alike outside the wall. They were there still, the bull despondently cropping the grass.
And beyond it, down at the foot of the hill, was the doom that had come to claim the Free. Yulan, standing on the walkway behind the Kingshouse’s ring wall, had stopped counting them once he got beyond two hundred, and saw many more still arriving. It would gain him nothing to learn the full extent of what opposed him.
Sullen made no attempt to conceal himself. He rode back and forth behind the spreading lines of his Clade warriors as they arrayed themselves in a long arc around the hillock. No blue tunic, no badges for him, the corsair boy grown to be commander of the School’s army. He still wore those same dull and ragged clothes, those same braids and beads in a half-head of hair, that he had when pretending to be one of the Free. If Yulan had to guess, he would say that Sullen pretended still. He was no more one of the Clade than he had been of the Free. He was, as he had probably always been from the moment of his birth, unlike other people, unwedded to their cares and concerns. A lone beast, stalking through the forest of humanity; imitating those around him with all the skills of a finely honed predator, but never truly belonging. Perhaps the School would come to see that too, after all of this was done.
The Free Page 32
