Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Nedlam was helping with the unloading, and that was surely the test. Celestaine would not have walked into any Arvennir town with the Yorughan as she had in Cinquetann. Even before the war, foreigners in Arven were advised to pay off one of the orders to avoid awkward questions or indefinite incarceration. Yorughan would surely end up as heads on pikes. And yet, while the Order of the Lily kept their eye on Ned, they kept their swords sheathed. The interpreter jabbed two fingers at her—to the Arvennir, even pointing was like threatening someone with a knifeblade—and suggested, We chain ours. It’s safer.

  Celestaine didn’t like the sound of that, and then the Shelliac was bringing her into the conversation with a piping whistle, indicating that Nedlam was hers, not theirs.

  The interpreter looked her up and down. “What’s this, then?” He spoke the language of the middle kingdoms almost without accent.

  “We’re travelling west,” she told him. “You have news from Bleakmairn?”

  His eyes widened. “Not a good place to go.”

  “Still?”

  “It’s complicated.” He shrugged. “You’re taking on labour, though? You can deal with us. You don’t need to go to the source.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about, but was damned if she’d admit it. At around that time, though, Heno appeared at her shoulder.

  “On the big boat,” he murmured. “My kin, many of them.”

  She didn’t question the knowledge. “What’s your cargo?” she asked the interpreter.

  “Labour,” the man said, as though it should have been obvious. “Plenty to rebuild back home. And it’s the one cargo that’ll row itself.”

  The skiffs themselves would be heading back to the wall, where the Lily apparently had some sort of camp within sight of Bleakmairn. The Arvennir were happy enough to take four passengers back in one of the skiffs, cautious about Nedlam and Heno but not hostile. They all got a good look at the galley before it took off eastwards. Its belly was full of Yorughan.

  They sat stoically two to an oar, huge blue-grey figures waiting for the command to row. Celestaine saw the chains.

  “What’s going on?” she asked the interpreter in a clipped voice.

  “They’re making themselves useful,” he said, waiting to see if that was going to be a problem for her.

  Heno had leant over the skiff’s side to exchange words with one of the rowers, and now he straightened up. “Let’s be about our journey,” he said to Celestaine.

  “But…”

  “It’s complicated,” he said, echoing the Arvennir’s words. He stared out at the wall thoughtfully.

  THE ORDER OF the Lily had occupied one of the wall forts. The soldiers here were a long way from home, and Celestaine expected to find them in a state of constant paranoid vigilance, given the Arvennir she’d known. Something had taken the edge off them, though. They kept up a westward watch out towards the Kinslayer’s heartland, but most were off duty, gaming, reading or just lying around. There was a scattering of Yorughan in the camp, hobbled with shackles and working on the fort, which had plainly taken a beating during the war. The westward wall in particular was still mostly rubble, along with the cracked carapace of a ram-wyrm, one of the Kinslayer’s living siege engines.

  “Did you come through here?” Amkulyah asked her. “On your way to kill the Kinslayer?”

  “We went south of the wall,” Celestaine recalled. “The Arvennir and the Frostclaw and a whole load more attacked the forts here, tied up his forces. We went round—the clans, some of the Cherries and a whole mess of squads and orphans who didn’t have anywhere better to be—forced marches and magical veils to keep the Kinslayer in the dark. We brought the fight right to his door, and then me and the Slayers got in, while everyone else was dying.” The recounting, which had started cheerily enough, ended very flat at the thought. She was glad of the interruption when a new voice broke in.

  “You’re headed for Bleakmairn?” It was a big Arvennir officer with a drooping ash-blond moustache, the interpreter at his shoulder.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I can’t guarantee your safety. It’s all Yogg land west of here within the wall.”

  “I don’t need my safety guaranteed,” she told him. “And what about these?” She indicated the Yorughan at work on the fort. “Do you raid for them?”

  “Raid for them? We pay them.” He shrugged easily. “But you’ve got to keep chains on them, just to remind them they’re not fighting us any more.”

  SHE HAD EXPECTED more obstruction from the Arvennir, but then she had expected them to still be at war, and instead they seemed to be settling into a comfortable life of… slave trading? She wasn’t quite sure, and Heno had said it was complicated. The answer to it all was with whatever Yorughan had taken over, on the inside of the wall. That was the enemy’s land, and though the armies of the free had tramped over it, they hadn’t stayed. The camp of the Lily was ostensibly the last friendly territory before… what? Not the Kinslayer’s monolithic war machine any more, but the same soldiers and monsters, the same louring fortifications, the breeding pits, the torture chambers, all the accoutrements of a demigod’s tyranny. And leaders had arisen amongst the defeated, of course, and one had started making deals with humans, and he was at Bleakmairn right now with all the answers, and perhaps with the crown.

  Leaving the Lily behind and riding past the wall was unnerving. The land was blackened, dotted with stands of crooked, unnatural trees, no two alike. The very presence of the Kinslayer, over years of occupation, had twisted the terrain to fit his inner nature. Everything was poisonous or jagged or hideous. But perhaps he had looked on all of this and counted it as beautiful. Perhaps it was a comfortable home to the Yorughan.

  “No,” Nedlam told her. “I mean, look at it. Can’t even sit down without getting a sharp rock up your arse. Better than below, though.”

  “Always better than below,” Heno agreed. By then they were in Bleakmairn’s shadow, waiting to see if the occupants would greet them with arrows.

  When the Kinslayer had erupted from the earth with his forces, Bleakmairn had been a fort belonging to one of the Varra hill kingdoms—Celestaine could not remember which, and there really weren’t many survivors left to inform her. The whole moorland and hill-land around this region had been a mosaic of kingdoms smaller than most Cheriveni towns, distant kin to the Forinthi, whose main pastime had been feuding with one another. The Kinslayer had chosen his invasion point well. ‘When the Varra eat together’ was one of those figures of speech that meant ‘never,’ and they’d had no time to change their ways before the armies of the enemy had picked them off, flattened their walls and enslaved or slaughtered most of their people.

  The Yorughan built swiftly and well, and their former master had held this land for almost a decade. Celestaine couldn’t see anything of the Varra left in Bleakmairn now. Its walls rose thirty feet, capped by jagged crenulations and lanced with arrowslits. Iron spikes slanted out below the wall top, and there were heads on some of them—all Yorughan, she noticed. She could see movement above, and the gates—twenty feet high and wide to accommodate the Kinslayer’s engines and monsters—stood open. Inside, a band of Yorughan were forming up, and Celestaine’s stomach clenched. The war’s over, she told herself, but right here it wasn’t. The Kinslayer had died, but these soldiers had never really been defeated.

  Heno strode past her, lifting his staff and setting its end alight with a Heart Taker’s cold fire, a badge of office every one of the Kinslayer’s minions would recognise. His voice boomed out, declaring something in his own tongue, alien words that rolled and clacked around his tusks. In the midst of it, Celestaine caught her name.

  “Hmf,” Nedlam observed. “That’s torn it open, then.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Put it like this, everyone in there knows the Kinslayer’s come to visit.”

  Celestaine looked at the fortress full of Yorughan soldiers and who knew what else, and had to clen
ch her hands on the reins to stop herself just turning around and riding off.

  Chapter Nine

  STEPPING THROUGH THE gates of Bleakmairn, into the very grasp of the Yorughan, took as much courage as Celestaine had. If she hadn’t ever met Nedlam and Heno, it would have been too much for her. Even with them at her side, the massed stare of all those flinty eyes, the regard of so many grey tusked faces—it all brought back far too many bad memories. The shield wall at Ornasco where the Yorughan had charged down the hill and shattered the entire defending army in ten bloody minutes, or the seven-hour struggle over the river crossing at Matton, the waters choked with enemy dead and yet still they kept coming…

  They weren’t in chains here, but they were working. The west gate of the fortress was open as well—she could see clear across the courtyard to the land beyond—and a train of ore wagons was just being hauled in, no beasts of burden, just iron Yorughan muscles. A great furnace and smithy took up one whole side of the quad, and they were busy about it, the air ringing with the sound of hammers and hazy with the heat of molten metal. Celestaine thought of weapons, armour, an army rebuilding itself for renewed hostilities. All she saw were ingots, though, rank on rank of good iron being loaded into yet more wagons to be taken elsewhere.

  “Got the mines going still, then,” Nedlam observed, and Heno nodded.

  Amkulyah shivered. The Dorhambri, where his people had been chained, was north-west of here, in land since reclaimed. There had been other mines, though—the Kinslayer loved working the earth, tearing out its bounty with the blood of slaves, and who knew more of the earth than those races that had been condemned to its darkness?

  Of course the armies of the free had gone to those mines, killed the guards and overseers and freed every slave they could find on the way to fight the Kinslayer, but who was to say they’d found every pit? It wasn’t as if the enemy had kept neat records of their atrocities.

  The doors of the main keep slammed back abruptly and more Yorughan were marching out, a dozen wearing some of the heaviest armour Celestaine had seen—the sort they used to break the Cheriveni pike fences or force the breach of a wall. They were all of them nearly as big as Nedlam, marching in step. She felt the ground shiver with their tread, and so did she. Her hand found the hilt of her sword as though it was an anchor to keep her in place.

  They formed two ranks, either side of the doors, and between them came someone who was plainly the undisputed master of Bleakmairn.

  He was about a foot shorter than his honour guard, but nobody found it funny: a barrel-chested, broad-shouldered Yorughan wearing a miscellany of war-loot from across the world. His breastplate, black steel with silver ornament, had surely been made for an Oerni trade-lord’s son. His bracers had been greaves for a Cheriveni officer. The slender-seeming sword at his belt was an Arvennir half-and-a-half bearing the insignia of an order preceptor. His remarkably bandy legs were swathed in loose silk pantaloons, garish iridescent blue and set off by a red-lacquered armoured codpiece from who knew where. About his shoulders and waist was a rust-coloured cloak worn immaculately in the Forinthi style. Celestaine recognised the colours of the Maidenhair clan, now extinct.

  Tucked under his arm, like a marshal’s baton, was a goad with a savage, hooked head, the sort they used to wrangle dragons and siege monsters. Celestaine took from this that he was something of a disciplinarian. His bluish face was square, scalp shaven on top but with shaggy sideburns and a snarly tuft of beard. Someone had hit him quite hard with an axe some time ago: an angry, puckered furrow slanted above one ear, its trailing edge crossing his brow and check, a miracle the eye had survived.

  He looked at Celestaine and grinned around tusks that pointed almost straight sideways. His face was brutal, but the smile gave life to it and made it charming.

  Nedlam had been staring at him, uncertain, but the smile apparently tipped the balance; she thumped her fists to her chest and bowed her head, the same pose that the honour guard had adopted. “U’rostir!” she snapped out. General.

  THE ARVENNIR, IN their eternal quest for sophistication, drank killingly strong liquor out of tiny porcelain cups. In the Yorughan’s hands, the vessel looked like a thimble, smaller than the last joint of the general’s thumb; it seemed impossible that it should not be crushed any moment. Even so, he raised it to eye-level, meeting Celestaine’s gaze past the exquisite miniature scene of Arven farmland painted on the side.

  “Your grand health,” he toasted. He had a surprisingly soft voice, thick with accent, less comfortable with human speech than Heno or Nedlam.

  Celestaine nodded and returned the pledge, knocking back the shot and feeling it sear the back of her throat pleasantly. They were all in the general’s study, a room that Bleakmairn had not been designed to include, but that he had created by simply cramming a high-ceilinged armoury with furniture and knocking out part of the wall to make a bigger window. He sat on a gilded chair carved with twining oaks that had probably belonged to the Varra chieftain who’d once made this site his home. Behind him, a bookshelf reached most of the way to the ceiling, the contents chosen either for their look or because the general had a remarkably inclusive taste. One wall bore a framed map that had plainly done campaign duty in its time, stained and smudged and scarred.

  “We never met, I think,” the general murmured, staring at her. “Of course, your name is known to me, even before you killed him.”

  “Yours likewise, General Thukrah.” Which was, if anything, an understatement.

  There were surprisingly few names amongst the forces of the enemy that had become common currency amongst those they threatened. The greatest of the pit-bred monsters, certainly, because they were not exactly going to win any popularity contests amongst the rank and file. But one reason Heno had turned coat was that the Kinslayer was deeply suspicious of any underlings who showed too much personality or ambition.

  Thukrah was the exception. He had led the fighting in the north at first, shattering the forces of the Frostclaw and the Udrengasi, and then he’d come down after Bladno to take on the various little kingdoms gritting up the wheels of the Kinslayer’s advance eastwards. Celestaine recalled the stammering voices of prisoners he’d taken. He dined with them—the best food the conquered had to offer, wines chosen with delectable taste. He’d made conversation—through a translator, back then—talking about the most recent book he’d picked up, the weather, philosophy, subjects he was plainly only now encountering, but conversation nonetheless. Then he’d let the lucky soul go, after a fraught evening of tusk-slurred small talk, but only after watching their comrades get viciously executed. The released prisoner then became an involuntary ambassador, spreading the sort of fear that won battles before they were even joined.

  And now here he was, and a long-armed Grennishman knuckled over and refilled his tiny cup, and did the same for Celestaine.

  “You don’t know what you think,” Thukrah supplied for her. And, at her cautious nod, “You want I should be dead? Plenty do; plenty want us all dead. Some, though, some of your kind say: they didn’t make the war happen. The Kinslayer, hm? His mind, our blades. You came in with these two no-goods, so you’re one of them saying that second thing, hrm?”

  Celestaine glanced at Heno, who was watching her, and at Nedlam, who was chain-eating the small cakes the Grennishman had set out as though hoping one would eventually be filling enough. Amkulyah was sitting on the arm of her chair, knees drawn up, the frailest living thing in the room by some margin.

  Here goes my mouth, then, she thought, and said, “Some would suggest that you must have had more say in what went on than Nedlam here. You went about things your own way.”

  “At great risk to myself.” That smile came out again and he swilled the spirits in his thimble and knocked them back. “Ah! Good! The Kinslayer is in my head a lot, telling me, go here, defeat these people, make everything mine. You can’t imagine. He knows.” A nod at Heno. “The Slackers, they’re always having him turn up and tell them
what’s what. So I do it my own way. Fear, lies, tricks, like I’m sure you noble peoples wouldn’t deign to use. I fight fewer battles. I lose fewer soldiers. Kill fewer of you, too.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” she said slowly. And then, “I’m not here as some great avenger, General Thukrah.”

  His face was abruptly serious. “I’m glad. Because I don’t want you as an enemy, not you, not that sword you have. You saved your many nations and tribes and peoples, when you shed the blood of him. You saved us more. You had only been his slaves for ten years, less.”

  “So tell me about slaves.” She just threw it out there, saw his eyes narrow as he chewed the words to see where they were leading. “We saw your people in chains. The Arvennir said they’d bought them.”

  “Bought their backs, their arms,” Thukrah said. “Their work.”

  “And yet the chains.”

  He shrugged. “You know who those were, on that boat? They did not want to do things the Thukrah way. And then we fought and they lost, then suddenly, oh, they do! They go to build walls for the Arvennir as penance. They go to win back their right to have a future.” He said it all very matter-of-factly, without venom. “They are ambassadors. Work hard, make you humans say, These Yoggs, good for something more than fighting.” He grinned, swiped the bottle from the Grennishman and necked it, a long draft of liquor meant to be measured in drops. “You would kill us all. Oh, not you, you are peace and tolerance incarnate, hrm? But your Arvenman, your northlings, better if we died with him. Or better if we went back where we started, give this land back to the dead people we took it from. As if that isn’t the best way to brew another war in ten years’ time.” He shook his head. “We are not going back into the earth. We have seen the sky now. The sky is better.” His eyes flicked to Amkulyah. “Ask him if the sky isn’t better than the earth.”