by David Hair
She found the body she sought and tried reading the gnostic traces. Halbertyr’s corpse was in two pieces, his torso, still in bloody silks, lying three feet away from the head. She crouched down, touched his frozen flesh to remind herself what his gnostic trace felt like, then tried to sort through the residues of the other spells. Someone had killed a half-blood mage: surely that meant another mage?
Halbertyr’s body had a great many stab wounds, the result of a frenzied attack. She noticed something clutched in his right hand: a knot of black hair, burned at the ends, and she stroked them, trying to draw out traces . . . The gnostic aura clinging to the hair was strangely blank, but she knew it: Valdyr Sarkany.
She straightened, frowning. Halbertyr had been an arrogant ass, but he’d been one of her legion, her people. She glanced over her shoulder at the small group of centurions watching her. Father entrusted his legion to Robear and me. We’ve got to strike back.
‘Clean up this mess,’ she snapped and stalked away. Robear would have clapped the survivors around the shoulders and told them they were heroes, but she’d never been able to do that, especially not when most of them leered at her whenever she turned her back. Damn them all. They don’t deserve praise.
It would be so much easier if the governor would actually commit his men to helping subdue the rebels, but Inoxion was just milking the situation, waiting for them to fail. He can go to Hel too.
She reclaimed her mount and packhorse and led them to a cliff-top overlooking the scene. For a while she stared out over the sea of trees, wondering how to end this aggravating guerrilla war. The Mollach insurgents were proving dangerously elusive. Normally finding a non-mage was relatively easy, but this kingdom was a nightmare, with its deep forests and mountains riddled with caves. And who knew snow could block scrying just as water did?
Her magi had tried using birds controlled by animagery to find their fugitives, but outside a mile or so they lost control of the creatures. Scryings were repelled by stone, water, snow and darkness – and anyway, you needed to know who you were looking for. The forests were teeming with life, so tracking-wards designed to trigger when trodden upon were set off by everything except their quarry. Hunting hounds were foiled by rivers and streams, and it was perilous using skiffs in this horrendous, unpredictable weather – and anyway, the forest gave ample cover. The enemy knew every hidden path, and they knew none. And the populace refused to be cowed.
We’ve only got a year left here, but we’ve extracted barely a tenth of the wealth Father’s demanding. The mines are only just coming back into production and the river traffic’s only now beginning to flow. We need a breakthrough, or we’ll have those bastard Augenheim bankers at our throats.
But now she had some of Valdyr Sarkany’s hair: an amateur’s mistake, and she was going to make him pay. Her affinities were in Theurgy – mind to mind – and Fire, but she had some strength in wizardry. That was a dangerous art, not to be used lightly, but it was also the best way to exploit what she’d found. She was working through her options when a gnostic call tickled at her mind.
He fell silent, then replied in a meek voice,
Oddly, it was the bleak loneliness of the vista that calmed her. She sat and shivered as the clouds streamed by overhead and the wind in the pines moaned below. She’d climbed high enough to not be overlooked and she felt like some pagan hunter-goddess, sniffing out her prey. The bleakness crept into her soul and soothed it.
I could live here – but Robear couldn’t. Her brother was desperate to return to Midrea, where he and his backslapping cronies and licentious ladies scavenged the courts like crows on a carcase. She’d always hated it, the gossip and the backstabbing and the constant assumption that she was a whore or a safian, when she was neither.
Rukk him. After this, I’m getting out and living in the wilds for a while. But first, we need to capture and kill these bastards. Her men were getting more and more frustrated chasing ghosts and her father was demanding they start butchering innocents to drive out the guilty – Robear was leaning that way now too. She was the only one advocating more rational methods so that the investors didn’t take fright.
These Mollachs don’t understand that I’m the one keeping the hounds leashed.
Which brought her back to Valdyr’s hair. She checked again that no one else was around, then marked out two summoning circles with silver dust from her belt-pouch, burning them into the rock with Fire-gnosis. She pulled saddlebags from the packhorse’s back and arranged the grisly contents in one circle, then stepped into the other, the circle that would protect her, and began her summoning . . .
The aether was partly of this world and partly of elsewhere. The dead passed through it, but there were other spirits that dwelled within it: invisible, timeless observers of human life, largely unable to intervene, unless a mage used Sorcery to interact with them. Some were revenants, the spirits of the dead – and not just human dead – but these were usually transitory, most dissipating or passing on after a brief time. Necromancers specialised in dealing with such spirits. The other ones, the daemons native to the aether, were weak, mostly, and easily controlled, of limited use, but the eldest had existed for millennia, and were much more dangerous – and useful.
‘Ajakhiaemus,’ Sacrista called, softly in this world, but loud in the aether, ‘Ajakhiaemus, come to me!’
Her cliff-top perch remained silent and empty, but her heightened perceptions told her that the aether was watching her now and spirits were racing in, attracted by the call. Her body and mind were a prize to them: a weak-minded mage could be destroyed, their psyche fed upon and drained . . . and then refilled. Wizardry destroyed its practitioners more than any other Study: the spirits could leave her an empty husk, a puppet to dance to their tune or a broken madwoman.
The cold wind stung her skin, but she ignored it and concentrated on her gnostic sight, which showed her more than a dozen man-sized pillars of darkness, daemons in their unformed state, swirling around her, testing her wards. She held them at bay, ignoring the harmless distractions of the wind spirits, and concentrated on her call. ‘Ajakhiaemus, speak to me.’
‘Sacrista,’ a voice hissed, inaudible to human ears.
‘Sacrista,’ the others echoed, picking up on her name, ‘Sacrista! Open up to me!’
‘Let me in – I will give you pleasures beyond imagining!’
‘Power – cleave to me and I will give you might beyond reckoning!’
‘Your ancestors rest inside me – do you yearn to speak to them, Sacrista?’
She clung to the first voice, reached through her wards and pulled it into the other summoning circle, then swept the others away with an aetheric wind, leaving just her chosen daemon, a pillar of dark swirling inside the circle.
‘Ajakhiaemus, thank you for coming.’
The pillar reformed into a male torso of black marble, visible from the waist up, wearing a blank white Lantric mask instead of a face, and flowing black curls.
‘It’s my pleasure to serve you again, Sacrista.’
Ajakhiaemus w
as an ancient being – maybe no giant among his kind, but his memories extended back to the Lantric city-states. She was proud that she, a mere half-blood, had mastered so old a daemon, but she remained wary: such a one was never truly subjugated.
‘Ajakhiaemus, I have a task for you. There’s a mage I wish you to find.’
‘I have sensed energies here,’ Ajakhiaemus hissed sibilantly. ‘Not often, not sustained, but close.’ He pressed his face to the edge of the circle. ‘Thou art lovely, Sacrista. Do you have a lover?’
‘Not everyone is obsessed with love.’
‘Without love, human life is meaningless. I have heard this so often, from so many.’ Ajakhiaemus altered his appearance a little, showing her hips and a solid phallus. ‘It saddens me that thy needs are unfulfilled.’
‘My needs are fine,’ she muttered. Her life had permitted few liaisons, and they had been mistakes, leaving her feeling soiled and repelled by notions of intimacy. She saw it as a blessing, because it left her mind clear.
‘I weep for thee, Lady.’
‘Don’t bother. I’ve left the hair of your prey inside the circle: use it to find him.’
She watched as Ajakhiaemus lowered himself to the ground and sucked Valdyr’s hairs into his masked mouth. When he straightened, he was Valdyr, but only for an instant, before becoming something shapeless.
‘Yes. Yes, I’ll find this one.’
‘You’ll need a body to wear in this world,’ she said, gesturing towards the gory mounds of animal parts laid out inside his circle. ‘Here is flesh for you to wear.’
She made herself watch as Ajakhiaemus inhabited the bloody remains of the beasts, using morphism, animagery and healing to pull together a form to wear. Sinews sprouted from the severed joints and melded with others, pulling and tugging and heaving until it had become something that could stand. The result was a bear’s torso and forearms, the haunches and hind-legs of a stag and the head of a wolf with an eagle’s eyes. Ajakhiaemus placed the stag’s antlers atop his skull for good measure, then made the wounds close and the fur blend.
When he stood, he was well over nine feet tall. He stared at her through the distorting haze of the protective circle. He tried to speak, shaping his mouth until words came out. ‘Hnngh-unghhh, da . . . vaz . . . sti . . . Sa . . . Criszz . . . Taaa . . .’ His voice was like stones grating against each other. Then he mastered it: ‘Sacrista!’
She shivered involuntarily at the blood-rimmed eagle-eyes, the corded muscles that bunched and flexed, the bloody claws on its paws. For a moment, blank hatred and lust shone from the daemon’s gaze and pierced her through.
‘Avaunt, Ajakhiaemus! Be still!’ She sent a shimmer of energy through the warding, like lashing him with a whip.
‘Peace, Witch! I will not assail thee.’
Carefully, cautiously, she loosed the wardings on his circle. She was still inside her own and unreachable, unless he broke the geas and then found the power to break her defences – that was possible, but unlikely. His physical presence here on Urte would be limited, in twenty-four hours or so her gnostic-bindings would break and his soul would be flung back into the aether.
You will not harm me or my people. She ensured he understood that meant her soldiers. You will hunt Valdyr Sarkany and take him alive if possible. Kill him only if that is not possible. You will remain open to me throughout, and you will obey my commands. She had to be able to follow his progress and adapt to new threats. You will hunt by stealth, until you see the opportunity to strike. ‘Do you understand?’ she asked the terrible giant towering over her.
‘I understand.’
It’s moment of truth time . . . She dispelled the wards penning him inside the circle and Ajakhiaemus stepped cautiously onto the wet grass and yowled at her hungrily. But after a momentary contest of wills, he turned and bounded away into the forest. She sat within her own protective circle and opened her mind, seeing through his eyes as he crashed through the woods, following an intangible spore. In the first stream, he washed the gore from his body to lessen his scent, then went north and east into White Stag Land.
An ancient daemon like Ajakhiaemus was no single mind, more like a floating spiderweb of intelligences controlled by one central intellect that could be in many places at once. That core of intelligence now resided in the skull of the construct-beast, but the rest could sense and scry on many levels: already he was picking up resonances no mage could ever have detected, while his beast-limbs ate up the miles, pausing only to drink, and then to savage and eat a wild boar.
By dusk, she could sense the daemon’s excitement as it closed in on its prey; she could feel the dreadful lust and hunger that filled its chest: a shiver of appetite that ran the length of her spine to wet her cleft and hollow out the marrow from her thigh bones. She opened her eyes, grinning savagely, drool running down her chin in rivulets as she pushed her fingers into herself and began to rub.
Links to such a powerful daemon never went just one way.
*
Three raiding parties, around a hundred men of the Vitezai Sarkanum, met up in southern Feher Szarvasfeld, or White Stag Land. The raids had been successful and they had plenty of plunder, even cattle from the Reztu Valley. The tunnels of the Rahnti Mines weren’t suitable for livestock, so they planned to use the Magas Gorge route, a tough path, but their only option to get their plunder back to Lake Jegto.
The backslapping Valdyr was getting over killing the Rondian battle-mage was making him uncomfortable. Yes, he’d struck the killing blow, but it was Iztven and Ghili’s victory more than his – although the two old Sydians didn’t seem to care.
He joined Dragan Zhagy and Tibor Siravhy at their fire, where they were sipping palinka and exchanging war stories. The two men touched their hearts respectfully as he joined them: they’d faced death together now, and new bonds were being forged. More than that: these were quite possibly his future subjects, if anything – Kore forfend – happened to Kyrik. At least he’d shown them that he could fight.
The gnosis will come, he told himself, and I’ll be Kyrik’s right hand.
‘We’ve got thirty head of cattle,’ Dragan was saying. ‘Once we get them north to Jegto, we’ll slaughter them and cure the meat. There’ll be enough for the entire campaign. We’ve made a good start.’
‘Where do we strike after that?’ Valdyr asked.
‘I’m thinking we go south of the river and hit the silver traders as they leave Rejezust. They won’t expect that.’
‘But wouldn’t we be cut off afterwards?’
‘Plenty of caves in the south too,’ Tibor replied. ‘We could spend the whole summer there and never run out of boltholes.’
‘But when Kyrik returns, it’ll be to Jegto—’
‘I’m sure he could find you in a blizzard, lad. But we’ll leave some of our people at Jegto to meet Kyrik and guide him to us.’
‘I’ll take your advice,’ Valdyr said. He really wanted to be the one making the decisions, but Dragan and Tibor were far more experienced, so he contented himself with trying to understand their reasoning. They’d been talking for hours and were all yawning—
—when something out in the darkness gave an unearthly yowl, the hunting cry of something between wolf and a much larger other, that froze his blood. Dragan paused, eyes narrowing in puzzlement, and that set Valdyr’s nerves to trembling . . .
He came to his feet, reached over his shoulder and drew his zweihandle. All round him, the others were also rising, drawing blades, stringing bows and checking quivers, all looking about apprehensively.
Darkmoon was only days away and Luna was just a crescent. A few drifts of dirty, hard-crusted snow lingered – which was how he caught the movement of something large lumbering across a clearing on the far side of the valley. ‘There!’ he said, jabbing a finger, but it had already vanished into the trees.
Valdyr was bitterly envious as Iztven and Ghili lit shields, faint traceries of pale blue light that cocooned them, then faded from sight. As
they hobbled forward he could almost feel the eyes of something across the valley swivel and focus fully on him. The sensation reached every one of his senses: like a claw caressing his skin. A low growl resonated inside his eardrums.
‘Wolf?’ Dragan asked, his voice throaty.
It’s more than a wolf . . .
There were four monsters that peopled the tales of Mollachia. The most reviled was the strega, an evil witch (who could be male or female); as children, Kyrik and Valdyr had grown accustomed to finding rusted knives under pillows or cloves of garlic bound to their doors, for the castle staff had struggled to accept that their lord had married a mage, not a strega. Such a one must be staked into their grave – a ‘witch’s grave’ – to prevent their spirit from plaguing their enemies after death.
Then there was the sarkan, the draken-like creature who protected the realm, but demanded sacrifice in return – Valdyr’s family took their name from that very beast. The strigoi, the unquiet dead who fed on the blood of the living, were the reason evil men and women were burned in Mollachia, not interred. And finally, there was the vrulpa: someone who took beast-shape to kill; legend had it that to despatch a vrulpa, you had not only to hack the head from the body, but the teeth must be turned into windchimes to drive off their kin. Stronger than Oakhearts, swifter than Night, the old verse went, Wild as the Wind, hungry as Fire.
‘Vrulpa,’ he whispered now, and Dragan stiffened.
The beast howled again, louder now, from somewhere at the base of a rocky, steep-sided gully maybe two hundred feet from where he stood. All round him, men poked torches onto the fires and lifted them to pierce the darkness as others nocked arrows to taut bowstrings.
‘Form up,’ Dragan growled. ‘Protect your prince—’
As the men began to move, the beast yowled again, the maddened shriek of something goaded to the chase, and a huge shaggy shape broke from cover. Bows sang and arrows flickered, then light flared and the shafts shattered on gnostic shields. The beast raised itself on its hind legs and raced into the clearing, flames crackling along its arms. Its shape was nothing of nature: a stag’s hind-legs, a bear’s chest, a wolf’s head, antlers on its crest: every inch shrieked of wrongness.
