“You malignant turd,” Celestaine addressed him with some relish. “A new Kinslayer, was it?”
Silvermort looked like he’d hit the wall face first when his creation had slapped him aside. He was already swelling into a bouquet of bruises, forcing the little marble half out of his eyesocket. “You’ve cut your own throat, Celest,” he mumbled through bloody lips. “You think it’d be just me who’d… profit? You’re tired of the hero business? They don’t need you any more, just like I can’t work the same way when there isn’t a bigger… shadow for people to be more scared of.” He spat a streak of red onto the floor. “You could have had it made.”
“I’ll live,” she told him flatly. “Tell me about the crown.”
“What crown?”
“The Kinslayer’s crown, the one he never got to wear,” she said. “Some man of yours, or just some man, he came here with it. He brought it to you, sold it to you, you took it from him, he… some damn thing.” As she stumbled over the words, she felt hope start to drain away, because it was all sounding very tenuous indeed. If he’d had such a thing in his hands, it would be here, where all his magic was concentrated. For that matter, if he’d had it, then probably she wouldn’t still be alive and standing, and he’d be off playing kingmaker to the Kinslayer.
And yet, and yet…
“Someone, carrying something of great power,” she told him slowly. “And you were always one for sniffing out power wherever it was hidden. Someone came here. You didn’t get the crown off them, then, but you know.”
He almost bluffed her. If she hadn’t known him from before, she would have missed the slight twitch about his single living eye. Hope flared up once more, as it always did. Silvermort was hiding something.
“Tell me.” But he just looked at her, battered but unrepentant, denying the crown’s existence for the sheer spite of it.
Heno’s hand was a comforting weight on her shoulder. “Celest, there’s work for a hero to do here. There’s a mine full of people who need to know that Silvermort’s not going to be a problem any more. They should probably make plans to leave, and you should probably make sure that no guards are going to stop them.”
Silvermort spat out a wheezy little laugh. “There will be more miners. The ore’s too valuable. If not me, then someone else.”
“And they’ll pay their workers fairly and nobody needs to be a slave,” Celestaine told him. “And don’t give me that If not me then someone else bollocks. I am not in the mood.” She looked at Heno, about to ask him what his plan was. He had his damnable little smile on, and she remembered that smile from before they had anything shared to smile about.
No. She reached inside herself for her Duty, that always cracked the whip in these moments, but perhaps the fight with the fake Kinslayer had given it concussion. They had come so far, and the road had been brambles all the way: Bleakmairn, Ilkand and now Silvermort and the Dorhambri. And if she didn’t ask, she could pretend, just for a moment, just a little, that she wasn’t complicit.
“Of course,” she said to Heno. “You hold the fort here. I’ll go break some chains.”
He nodded calmly. Heno, who had shaken off the Kinslayer’s yoke, yes. Heno, who had brought his evil master down. But, before that, Heno the interrogator.
She looked over at the others. “Kul, Ralas, Ned, let’s go.”
“But I wanted to…” Nedlam looked crestfallen.
“Ned, with me, please.” Celestaine went to go and then stopped, fixing Catt and Fisher with her gaze. “What about you two? Doctor Catt, perhaps your medical knowledge would be useful. Plenty of hurt slaves needing a bandage.”
Catt had the exact shifty look of a man about to go ransacking a heavily guarded fortress for a crown that almost certainly wasn’t there. She had him bang to rights, though, and she had Nedlam hulking behind her, and so he gave her a magnanimous smile and professed that he would be only too delighted. Fisher wasn’t with them, though, when they got outside, so Celestaine decided she’d been outmanoeuvred after all.
CELESTAINE WENT WITH the news that Silvermort was dead, because it was simpler than going into the gory details. Certainly Tarraki and the Grennishman magician had already been through with news of the fight, and Celestaine had met a notable absence of concerned well-wishers coming to see if their chief was all right.
Down the mines, a few of the guards started to put up a fight, but Nedlam, backed by Kul’s arrows, set some fairly solid precedent. Some of the guards bolted for the fortress itself, but a surprising number resigned from Silvermort’s service immediately. Doctor Catt explained their provenance—prisoners themselves, who had seemed like promising recruits. The liberation of the mine was accomplished surprisingly easily.
The Aethani majordomo proved the major sticking point. Even without his sedan chair, he refused to accept that the world had changed, practically charging Celestaine, all bandy legs and hanging belly, shrieking for her to bow the knee to his lord and master. Perhaps he hadn’t realised that none of the Yorughan or human muscle was backing him, or perhaps he had just grown so used to his station that he couldn’t conceive of things changing. He must have been here since before Silvermort, she guessed, here with Amkulyah, even, some Aethani collaborator who had been plucked from amongst his enslaved peers.
Kul fronted him, a prince before his errant subject, but the old man refused to acknowledge him, shoving him aside. That brought Nedlam in to shove back, sending the majordomo spilling across the floor, squawking in dismay. When he got to his feet, it wasn’t the big Yorughan he was facing, but a score of miners, most of them holding stones. And that was as far as he went. Plenty of his former victims had grudges to settle, enough that more than half would have to take their revenge vicariously.
The punitive attitude wasn’t transferred to the bulk of the guards who had turned coat, Celestaine noted. The worst of the bullies had either got behind the fort’s walls or fled, and she had the impression that Silvermort’s regime here had been undermined behind his back, the division between guard and worker never as impermeable as he’d wanted.
And speaking of Silvermort…
“I’d have thought you’d be talking to him,” Doctor Catt pressed her. “You must suspect he knows something.”
“Talking to Jocien Silvermort was always like trying to think through a maze filled with spikes,” Celestaine said, “even when we were supposed to be on the same side.” She was overseeing the freed miners and defecting guards, none of whom wanted to stick around. She had a list of destinations for them, places that wouldn’t have been over-reliant on the iron from this place. The guard huts had been broken into. Everyone had at least a little food.
“But still,” Catt went on. “You came this far…”
“And so did you,” she noted, turning to him at last. He had actually made himself halfway useful, patching up a variety of ailments with chirurgy and magic.
His smile seemed so wonderfully guileless. “One does become subject to wanderlust, does one not? It’s amazing where one can end up. But Silvermort…”
“Is in hand.”
“I’m sure I don’t understand you. Your Y-Yorughan’s guarding him.” He stumbled a little but managed to hurdle the automatic slur before it came out. “But one imagines—”
“Heno doesn’t do guarding,” she said. “How do you think we met, him and me? I was on the rack in Nydarrow and he was turning the crank.” She smiled a little, despite herself. “Not the most romantic of settings, you’d think.”
Catt thought through that and she watched understanding cross his face. “But you—”
“I want to know what Silvermort knows. And he wouldn’t tell me himself. He’d turn the whole exercise into one of his mind games about who was controlling who, he’d bargain and lie and weasel. And I’m not good at that. I’d lose my temper, doctor. Probably I’d kill him, or he’d trick me. I’m not clever like that, not really.”
“But you’re a hero. This isn’t the sort of activity I�
��d expect—”
She silenced him with a look. “I’m someone who fought the Kinslayer, along with thousands of others. I happened to get a magic sword from the Wanderer, and I ended up cutting the Kinslayer’s hand off, although even that didn’t turn out as well as I’d thought, I now discover. Where’s the hero in that?”
“But you’re doing your thing with the Aethani, all that grand gesture.” Doctor Catt seemed genuinely taken aback that she wasn’t opening her veins for the thirsty or walking through the crowd curing scrofula by touch. “You’re… supposed to be good.”
Celestaine suddenly felt very tired of it all, and profoundly glad that the miners were making their own way from the Dorhambri as swiftly as they could and without further intercession from her. “I try,” she said in a small voice. “I always try. Only back when I was young, being good meant raiding the clan next door, because we Forinthi only see eye to eye when there’s some other enemy we all don’t like. Like your lot, or the Kinslayer. And in the war I… I lost fights, doctor. I lost track of the number of battlefields all of us heroes ended up retreating from, magic sword or no. I lost friends. I saw towns burn. I abandoned the weak and the desperate because it was that or get caught along with them. I tried.” She heard her own voice shake, close to breaking all of a sudden. “I did everything I could, but so many people got hurt. I failed almost everyone I met. You think lopping a hand off a wrist balances that out?”
She was aware that her small voice had turned into quite a loud one, and that her companions were all looking at her. Ralas clapped a hand to her arm, a man who had shared in at least some of that pain, before she’d failed him and left him for dead, left him to be taken and tortured and pinned between life and death like a moth.
Doctor Catt pursed his lips as though she’d just made her outburst in the middle of a dinner party. “Well, if you will split hairs like that…”
“I’m saying this, here, to you, for one reason, doctor. Because you are messing with me, and don’t think your warding broach or whatever it is you’ve got will stop me letting Heno loose on you, if you ruin this for me.”
“For you?” he asked her, all innocence. “I’d thought this was all for the poor Aethani.”
Celestaine felt as though the ground had been whipped out from under her. It is for them, she insisted inside her head, but her own little speech weighed on her, all the wrong reasons she ended up doing the right things, all the right things she hadn’t done. And so here she was, having run out of war to win, trying to show the world she was still worth keeping around. Not so different from Deffo, now, am I? Although the immediate thought swung back at her, Didn’t run away, though, did I?
Catt was smiling smugly, well aware of having scored a point. Could I kill you, or have one of the others kill you? He was standing right there, the Catt that got the cream, so very sure he knew her. And he wasn’t Jocien Silvermort, who’d bleed monstrosity if you cut him. He was just a neat little Cheriveni townsman who was too clever for his own good, and that put Celestaine on awkward footing because that made him the villain and victim of all those Forinthi stories and traditions she was forever trying to separate herself from.
Something must have showed on her face, because his smile reached a new notch of self satisfaction and he nodded. “Here I am at your mercy, and I’m sure Nedlam there would take pleasure in transmuting me into a stain on the ground, but you won’t tell her to. It’s not in you, my dear. The fate of the unlamented Jocien aside, it’s not how you see yourself.” He struck the ferrule of his cane into the dirt and pivoted on it to walk away, coming face to face with Nedlam’s abdomen.
The big Yorughan leant down, and then further down until she was nose to nose with him.
“C’lest doesn’t tell me like that,” she informed his suddenly strained smile. “Sometimes I just stomp people into stains all on my own. But I won’t, ’cause I like you.” She said it as though it was the most terrible threat in the world. Catt’s stick slipped and he stumbled back a few steps, clutching at his amulet and momentarily without his prodigious stock of words.
That cheered Celestaine up no end. Then she saw Heno on his way back from wherever he’d been working and her mood sobered. I let him, didn’t I? I’m happy for him to go back to the way things were so long as it serves me. The obvious sequel, that Heno had been only too happy, was a different flavour of troubling, but at least it suggested the two of them were made for each other. He looked happy, too, practically whistling as he sauntered over. We are not good people, not really. We are just trying to do good things. And it had been Jocien Silvermort, and of all the people she could have asked to rid the world of, he was high on the list. He was making a new Kinslayer, for Death’s sake! Surely even proper heroes have limits? But she knew they didn’t, that proper heroes would just do right by the worst villains in the world, following their codes, never set a Yorughan torturer on their enemies. Probably never get into bed with the Yorughan at all—literally or figuratively. Probably a proper hero would be cheering on the old Ilkand Temple to exterminate everyone who even lifted a finger in the Kinslayer’s cause. Because that’s easier, isn’t it? Us and them, black and white. I hope it is, because is sure doesn’t feel easy where I’m standing, here in the grey.
She made sure Catt was nowhere in earshot, in a futile attempt to shake him off the trail. Doctor Fisher was also on his way back, she saw, stepping from the fort’s shadow and dodging a few arrows from the garrison still holed up inside. He was heading off towards Catt, though, so she drew Heno aside.
“Well?”
“You’re not going to like it.” He was smiling, though, every bit as pleased with himself as Catt had been.
“You’re not supposed to enjoy it,” she told him, more for her conscience than his.
For a moment he had that… Yorughan look on his face, the one she knew from the war, where there just didn’t seem to be any common ground at all, and they were doomed to fight forever. Then, without any of his features really moving, he was Heno again, looking slightly awkward.
“I know,” she said. He had spent all his life being told a certain story about morality, how to act towards others. Mostly, that plying his skills as magician and interrogator was a good thing, the greatest good in the Kinslayer’s cause. He had broken from it. She had watched him break from it, from her position on the rack. But everyone carried their past with them. Heno was no exception.
“Anyway, our man came here, guested with Silvermort,” he explained. “He had something of power on him—would fit with the crown, from the detections Silvermort tried on it. Why he came here, no idea. It seemed like a chance visit, and he was still done up like an Ilkin Templar. He came, he left, and Silvermort sent a half-dozen of his best to cut his throat and bring the magic back, whatever it was. Our man killed them, all but one. This is why Silvermort was so short on henchmen—his old followers from the war all got hammered flat.”
“And Silvermort…?”
“Is not this world’s problem anymore,” he said smoothly, and she accepted that, grateful for the lack of details.
“So where did he go, this Templar?” she asked.
“This is the bit you won’t like.”
“I thought that was the bit where he killed five of Silvermort’s veterans single-handedly.”
“He went into the Unredeemed Lands.”
“To Bleakmairn?” For a moment the whole thing became a plot by General Thukrah, somehow, but Heno was shaking his head.
“Closer to here, and outside of the area Thukrah’d got under his control. The real Unredeemed Lands.”
Meaning those lands the Kinslayer had come to first, and which were still a blackened ruin infested with rogue monsters and the tattered remnants of the Kinslayer’s armies. They would be reclaimed, year by year, and there would come a time grass would grow there once more, and the monsters would either be dead, or just possibly would be regenerated into people in the eyes of the rest of the world, as Thukrah was tr
ying so hard to accomplish. But right now the Kinslayer’s deep heartland remained the most dangerous place in the world.
“Why?” Celestaine moaned. “Why would a Templar, or whatever he is… Or is he another fake Kinslayer? Not a construct, I mean; some magician or warlord who thinks he can rally the armies, restart the war?”
Heno shrugged. “No idea, but you’d better get the last of the slaves out and then we’d better get moving. Sooner than soon.”
She frowned. “What?”
“While Silvermort and I were having our talk, Fisher had his own ideas.”
“He was looking for the crown, I assumed?”
“He was freeing the Vathesk.”
She blinked. “What Vathesk?”
At around that time the shouting and roaring started from within the fortress, from all those of Silvermort’s followers who had so securely barricaded themselves inside.
Definitely time to go, Celestaine decided.
Chapter Twenty-Three
TWO DAYS OUT, and they were camped about a fire that Nedlam had set, in the scrub off a road nobody else seemed inclined to travel. Going to the Unredeemed Lands was hardly at the top of most people’s to-do list.
Celestaine had heard of some who had: Templars, Arvennir warrior orders, those for whom the end of the war hadn’t meant the end of the fighting. Perhaps there were even people from the Varra kingdoms the Kinslayer had ousted, wanting their land back. She wouldn’t, if she were them; the Kinslayer had had a decade to make free with those lands. There would be little left there that was natural, plant or animal. Monsters would lurk in every cave and twisted grove, and the land would be riven with passages down to that buried land where the Kinslayer had licked his wounds and mustered his armies.
And what about that buried land, exactly? There were Yorughan and Grennishmen and plenty more still down there, those who hadn’t marched with the armies. To hear Heno tell of it, there weren’t as many as you might think. The Kinslayer hadn’t had much time for minions who couldn’t fight, and the fighters had mostly issued forth onto the surface at the start of the war. There were some stay-at-homes, though. Children, learning in tight-packed crèches about the Kinslayer’s divinity and their eternal enemies on the surface. Monsters even the Kinslayer had not been able to marshal for his armies. Those who had turned away from his orders even before the war, hiding in nooks and crannies in the dark. And the people of the surface were going to have to come to terms with those depths, if they didn’t just try and shove all the Kinslayer’s creatures back down into them.
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