by James Abbott
THE
NEVER
KING
JAMES ABBOTT
PAN BOOKS
For Tobias
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: The Ninth Age, Year 126
The Ninth Age Year 131
The Gates of Hell
Hell’s King
Forging Peace
Jarratox
A Dark Court
Elysia
Landril’s Mask
Landril
Witches
Strange Noises
Rest
The Carcass
The Wolf Queen
A Royal Meeting
The Long Walk
Old Skin
Forest Food
Night Fight
Leaving Jarratox
The House of Blood
Another Night of Dreams
The Silent Lake
Entourage
Refugees
Screams
No Time for Kindness
Earthcraft
Pyre
Memories
Deciphering
A Second Escape
Dawn
Time to Attack
Nightmares
Headquarters
A Tactical Move
The Road to Golax Hold
A Night at the Tavern
Fading Dreams
Back on the Road
The Art of Assassination
At the Silent Hawk
A Celebration
Breaking Magic
Forging
The Arrival
Aftermath
Questions
The Wait is Over
Scent
The Tide of War
Tip of the Spear
Underground
Din of War
Choice
Redemption Proper
A Task Unfinished
Melee
Into Reality
PROLOGUE
The Ninth Age, Year 126
Dress like an animal. Act like an animal. By the thunder of the Goddess, Jorund thought, even talk like an animal. Barbarism to combat barbarism.
Those had been the orders from one of King Cedius’s messengers. Act like barbarians before the King’s Legion arrived to bring the discipline of the king to the borderlands. Jorund had been posted to the town for just three months and had much to prove, and he was too wise a watchman to ignore a direct order from Cedius the Wise, despite not seeing the wisdom of such tactics himself.
Jorund daubed woad to his face within the cramped confines of his watchman’s house and considered the grim situation ahead. Those too young and too old to participate in the coming battle were escorted into the nearby caves – Jorund’s young, pregnant wife, Carmissa, among them. All who remained were willing fighters determined to protect their homes.
Clan markings were being ripped down in the town, and in their places crude animal totems were thrown up. And the reason for such deceptions? There was a dark flood of barbarian tribes from the north making forays into the Plains of Mica, their armies streaming forth into the northern reaches of Stravimon. That was a cause for concern to the king. If the tribes came together in their thousands it would be a bloody mess for the towns and cities far beyond Baradium Falls.
So it was that the most northerly settlements had been given the strange instructions to disguise themselves as tribal towns in the hope that the invading armies would consider the places their own territory and pass them by, looking for richer pickings. To Jorund this seemed wishful thinking, even if it had worked once before, two decades ago. Still, Jorund lived in hope that it might work or at least buy the townsfolk time until their rescuers arrived. Ahead of Cedius’s First Legion were advancing the finest warriors in the kingdom – the Solar Cohort. Legends would be riding into his town. Jorund’s heart thumped at the very thought of the great names: Xavir, Dimarius, Felyos and Gatrok among them.
Jorund hauled on his furs, grabbed his axe and strode outside into the thick cool air. At the top of the steps he surveyed the wide street. Above the braying townsfolk he could hear the roar of Baradium Falls itself, and smell its pungent aroma above the woad that caked his face. Well over a thousand savage-looking warriors looked towards him expectantly.
A grin came to Jorund’s lips. This will do. ‘Well, make a noise, you ugly bastards. You’re meant to be savages!’
And with that the people of Baradium Falls roared like creatures of the woods.
*
Hundreds of townsfolk, pretending to be something they were not, waded into the line of trees beyond Baradium Falls. The next settlement, two miles to the east, Belgrosia, had reportedly put twice their number out. A long night lay ahead of them all. With luck, the ruse would work . . .
A blue mist settled, glowing ethereally in the gibbous moon. The people looked like ghosts within the gloom. Men and women from young to old, each one covered in mud and woad and furs – he could barely recognize any of them.
He’d sent out scouts in an attempt to see where the northern barbarians were expected to strike first, and they were to report back at the first sign of trouble. The warriors’ march slipped into a trudge. Jorund grew ever more tense. His breath coiled pale before him. Something did not feel right. His scouts had not returned yet and that unnerved him. In the distance, a wolf howled.
Wolves don’t stray this far west, he thought. Then the woodland began to thunder around him, the ground shaking perceptibly. The people of Baradium Falls hastily arranged themselves, and began slamming the flat of their blades against their armour just as their barbarian enemies would. Should they encounter them the hope was that the barbarians would think them some of their own warriors – it was a slim chance. Jorund scanned the tree trunks around him breathlessly, searching for signs of incursion into the woodland. Screams drifted across the top of the forest from some distance away. His heart thumped.
‘Riders!’ someone shouted, from the darkness.
‘The king’s men!’
‘Solar Cohort!’
Thank the Goddess. Jorund thought. If they were attacked now, help was at hand.
Something wailed like a banshee’s scream and a torchbearer’s light in the distance was extinguished.
It must be their foe. Jorund yelled for his people to charge. His longsword held aloft, he stepped over bracken, between the towers of oak. Moonlight penetrated a clearing, illuminating the ground ahead, but when he arrived he saw only corpses cleaved open on the earth. Corpses that he recognized from Baradium Falls.
Where are their attackers? Barbarians don’t ambush – they don’t have the finesse for it. There was something wrong about the wounds as well: too clean, too professional . . .
‘Watchman!’ someone screamed. ‘Beyond the clearing—’
‘Make haste,’ Jorund shouted.
He saw the shapes dismount from their horses, and was confused again by the incongruity. Since when did barbarians ride horses? He could make little sense of who or what these warriors were. Six figures in black began to carve into the people of Baradium Falls like daemons from another world. The screams were intense. Jorund threw himself towards the front of the townspeople, then stopped in horror. Upon the black jerkins of the warriors were symbols of crenellated towers and the rising sun. The Solar Cohort.
It’s not possible.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘We’re Stravir! We’re on the same side!’
But in the madness of slaughter his voce was lost to a melee of screams.
Blades blurred and wailed as they separated limbs and heads from their bodies. Within a brief moment, hundreds of people had been butchered. By just six warriors, legends indeed. Jorund fell to his knees as the warriors loomed. His sword sli
pped from his hand. He hurriedly stripped off his furs, removed the bone chains and tribal totems from his body and showed them the single leather breastplate bearing a watchtower he wore underneath.
‘I am Stravir!’ he sobbed, looking around him in anguish at the innocent villagers who had met such a grisly end. ‘We are all Stravir . . .’
One man sheathed his two enormous curved swords over his broad shoulders with a flourish and stepped across the corpses towards him. His face was lean and glistened with blood in the moonlight.
‘Speak, man!’
‘We are Stravir, all of us. We’re not the northlanders. We’re not barbarians.’ He waved his hands towards the dead. ‘They were from Baradium Falls.’
The tall man glanced to the others. ‘Dimarius?’
A blond-haired figure approached, his face full of confusion. ‘Why were you dressed like barbarians?’
‘The king’s orders,’ Jorund muttered.
Dimarius shook his head at the tall warrior who was staring in horror and grief at the corpses surrounding them.
He looked back and Jorund flinched at the expression of intense anger and shame that crossed the soldier’s features. ‘What have we done?’ he asked bitterly.
No one was able to answer him. The watchman stared through his tears. Nearby someone screamed in mourning.
The Ninth Age
Year 131
The Gates of Hell
‘You’ll die here if you’re lucky.’
A gust of wind whipped across the wide courtyard, scattering flecks of snow from the mountain directly into Landril’s face. It was as if the weather conspired with everything else to make him even more miserable than he already was.
As if the freezing conditions and his situation weren’t hard enough, every few steps across the grime-caked grey slabs, the bastard guards heckled the prisoners, spat at them, or worse. Landril wondered what perverse enjoyment they got from their entertainment. Even their pathetic attempts would make anyone feel much more terrible than they already did for coming to a place like this.
‘Get a move on, mongrels,’ one snapped, jabbing for emphasis with his spear at those not moving quickly enough for his taste. ‘Your mothers must have bedded yaks to spawn half-breeds like you.’
The old, balding man in front of Landril winced in pain and spat defiantly at the foot of his tormentor.
Fool. It’s precisely what they want.
A response. An excuse. An opportunity to turn a simple game into a bloodsport.
The guards moved in quickly, knocking the man to the floor while Landril quashed any instinct to help. The rest of the prisoners watched impassively, seemingly indifferent. It was every man for himself here. The guards beat the old man, dragged him, unshackled, across the stone and out into the blinding white. They seemed in no hurry to finish things off – making a show of their violence. A warning, perhaps, to those watching.
Landril kept his head down, so only caught glimpses as the four guards kicked the cowering prisoner over and over again. With a final, violent kick across the man’s face, his neck snapped back. Blood sprayed and teeth rattled across the stone. He collapsed in the snow while the guards laughed and clapped each other on the back. They left him where he lay. Landril wasn’t sure if he was dead or not. For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off the beaten corpse – would that be his own fate? He scanned his surroundings: huge slab-sided walls made from granite, a series of gateways interspersed by courtyards, designed to block the progress of rioting prisoners. Have I done the right thing? he wondered.
‘Welcome to Hell’s Keep,’ one guard sneered at the prisoners before motioning them forwards.
Head down. Do not make eye contact.
Hell’s Keep. An apt moniker. More so than its official designation, Citadel Thirty-Six. The grey, high, fortress-like walls were built into the third highest peak of the Silkspire Mountains, two thousand feet up from one of the long-abandoned merchant routes out of the eastern kingdoms. Well away from the home comforts of Stravimon. This was a place to send only the most hardened and dangerous criminals. Those too deadly to imprison in any normal gaol – but too important or useful to have killed. No one had ever escaped.
It was the location rather than the quality of the security that made it so invulnerable. Freezing temperatures at altitude, and visibility obscured by snow. Winding, rocky, treacherous paths that cut through coarse undergrowth. Witches at the foot of the mountain.
Landril looked appraisingly at the fifteen Stravir soldiers in crimson uniforms and bronze helms accompanying them. There were another four dozen within the gaol itself, probably huddled around coal fires and cursing their luck for being stationed at the arse-end of the world. They were as trapped as their own prisoners.
As his group were marched into the innermost part of the gaol, the stench of shit and unwashed bodies massed together attacked his senses. More attuned to incense, perfumed rooms and the luxury of city life – Landril almost gagged at the cloying odours.
A horn’s braying echoed around the walls, and the mammoth iron doors ahead of them screeched demonically as they opened. Landril took one lingering look at freedom before being pushed with the others through the gateway of hell.
Mercy of the Goddess. That bastard had better damn well be alive, or I’m buggered . . .
*
Through whispers and glances and gestures in the shadows, information came quickly to a man of Landril’s learning. Within just a few hours of incarceration, he had found a shifty-looking man of some fifty summers who was grateful for a packet of Landril’s smuggled herbs.
His name was Krund, a wiry fellow with damp grey shoulder-length hair and a scruffy beard. He was one of the three cellmates Landril was forced to share with. Each of the men here wore the same clothing, a thick grey tunic that itched all over like a dockyard rash.
‘I don’t get it,’ Landril said, playing the part of a novice.
‘Get what?’ Krund sighed.
‘Why not just kill us and be done with it?’
‘Well, a different breed of men get brought here,’ Krund muttered. ‘A thief would get his hand severed at the wrist. A common murderer beheaded. Us? We were of value to someone on the outside and so we were spared immediate death.’
‘Any famous people here, then? Well-known figures from the court?’
Krund cast him a sly glance. ‘How should I know? Everyone’s a no one in here.’
Landril fought back the disappointment. He would have to scrutinize the face of every inmate just to be sure. He’d have to look into cold, hard eyes to find the man he sought, the hero of Twelve Valleys, the Plains of Anguish and just about every campaign of old Cedius’s rule.
‘What’d you do to end up here?’ Krund asked with barely concealed indifference. ‘You have no accent. You don’t look much like a man who knows his way around a blade.’
Information was power; Landril knew that better than any.
Landril smiled enigmatically. ‘My offences were mostly, shall we say, political.’
Krund chuckled, his features softening, but he still appeared more interested in the package of herbs Landril had given him.
‘And you? How did you come to be here, Krund?’
‘I was a lawyer working on behalf of a Stravir duke. Suffice to say I became engrossed in things I ought not to have become engrossed in. But life can be cruel – no point in being angry about it, is there? I have accepted my lot in life. And I’m still alive, aren’t I? But I’m tired, stranger. I could do with a rest and some time alone with your gifts.’
Landril left him to his corner, knowing that, when the time came, Krund would make for a useful informant. He watched as the door to his cell was locked with a sudden finality. Moments later he could hear thud after echoing thud as other inmates were sealed into their tomb-like quarters. The sliver of light through the stone showed very little of the room. Stone beds with dirtied blankets for warmth. Someone had said that the blankets were donations
from the nearby monastery; he just hoped they weren’t already infested with fleas. There was nothing else but wet, graffitied walls, a bucket to relieve himself in, and the company of miserable, hopeless men.
This is it, then. Landril Devallios, spymaster, dies here next to a bucket of piss.
He focused on the task ahead. Tomorrow he would start the search for the one man who could get him out of here. He would deliver his message. A few days after that, if what people said of his target was true, they would both be free. If not, then he’d have to spend the rest of his days locked up in this miserable rat hole. Landril considered death to be a better option.
*
Even for a man like Landril, who liked to play the long game, the conditions of Hell’s Keep made him feel tense and impatient. The conditions were beyond anything he’d ever encountered previously. And there was still no sign of his quarry. One day bled into another.
His life became measured by small miseries: his back aching from the stone slabs, the constant cold, the inedible food he gagged down at each meal. His searching became more desperate. The inmates were allowed to mix only once a day, which gave Landril just a small sliver of time in which to find his target. But the grim-faced prisoners all looked the same: unshaven, unkempt. Perhaps body shape would be the first indicator. Some men were scrawny, with little meat to their bones, but others had somehow maintained good musculature despite being here. Would the man he’d come to find have remained as strong as before? He’d been gone for years now, but he wouldn’t shrink in height at least. Landril flitted from prisoner to prisoner each day, careful not to make his searching too obvious. Too much curiosity would only get you killed in here. He questioned Krund subtly about the prisoners but his cellmate knew next to nothing about individuals. No one spoke of their past.
He eavesdropped on conversations, built up a network of inmates who reported to him. Ironically, he felt that the prison structure wasn’t that different from the machinations of court life. The drugs he had smuggled bought him eyes in darkened corners of the gaol, just as they had done over a year ago whilst he was investigating the murders outside Stravimon’s Court of Sighs. But the reports told him nothing more than he could see for himself: grim men, standing bored and constantly on the edge of violence. The usual prison politics.
