‘Who would do such a thing?’ asked Drake, while their mounts huffed and quavered beneath them, too well-trained to rush forward in a feeding frenzy.
‘Poachers, maybe?’ Edgar suggested.
The notion struck Joss as more than odd. After all, a poacher would never leave good meat to rot. ‘What do you think, Hero?’ he asked.
But Hero’s attention was still rooted on the smoke rising from Blade’s Edge Acres. From this vantage point the fortress was unassailable. It defied gravity with its hold on the high ground, the incline of the mountain too steep for them to approach directly. Instead, all the road signs told them they would have to travel up and around to pass through the mountaintop township of Skyend. Days of travel had brought them within a mere league of their destination – and now they were being guided away from it again.
‘I think we have to hurry,’ she replied as she took hold of Callie’s reins and gave them a crack. ‘Hyah!’
The sabretooth tiger leapt into action, springing up the lofty incline with an acrobat’s ease. Within moments she had disappeared into the distance, leaving the others with little chance of catching up.
Joss stole one last look at the carcass in the glade, surrounded by the host of half-hidden holy Messengers that had served as witnesses to its mysterious and violent end. Then he took to the road with his brethren, doing his best to ignore the ill omen at their heels and the fear of what lay ahead.
CHAPTER FIVE
A RAVEN LET LOOSE FROM ITS CAGE
THE prentices hurried past Skyend, having little time to admire the chalets, log cabins and slender towers that lined its salted cobblestone streets. Though for all its picturesque charm, the town was curiously empty. Only the occasional shopkeeper sticking their head out of their establishment’s door kept the place from looking completely abandoned.
‘Where is everyone?’ Joss asked as he took in their silent surroundings.
‘You don’t suppose they’d all be at the funeral, do you?’ Drake replied.
‘An entire town attending the funeral of a paladero lord?’ Edgar noted with some surprise.
‘This Lord Haven must have been more popular than a pound of mouse guts at a half-starved hatchery,’ Joss said, and immediately regretted it as Drake frowned ever so slightly. Hero was too far ahead to have heard, Joss noted with relief. She was urging Callie to go faster and faster, the sabretooth effortlessly lolloping past the town limits into the vast lavender fields that led the way to Blade’s Edge Acres like a rolled-out carpet.
But as the shadow of her home fell across her, Hero slackened her pace. The fortress looked remarkably different from this perspective. A sloping stone bridge rose up to meet the main gates, which were shielded behind a series of three star-shaped rampart walls. All the gates had been left wide open, allowing the crowds that had deserted Skyend to mill around the grounds in muted mourning.
Hero stopped at the outermost gate and stared past the townsfolk at the solid stonework ahead of her. She kept staring as her Bladebound brethren arrived by her side while she silently dismounted.
‘Hero?’ said Drake, slipping from his saddle to tentatively approach her. He looked like there was a hundred things he wanted to say to her, a hundred questions he wanted to ask, and a hundred things keeping him from uttering even one of them.
‘Don’t worry, Ganymede,’ she told him. ‘You know me. I don’t break easy.’
The prentices walked their animals through the fortress grounds, past the masses of people packed inside. Never fond of crowds, Azof chittered his discontent in Joss’s ear.
‘Settle down, boy. And behave yourself. Last thing I need right now is for you to go wild and disembowel somebody.’
Azof clucked, clearly offering no promises.
‘Rowan!’ Hero called out, and Joss looked over to see a man standing by the gatehouse. His hair was a long wavy waterfall of white, his beard a silver triangle that framed a quivering mouth. His grimy fingertips were pressed against the bridge of his nose, pinching away his tears, while an ornate hearing device stuck out from the side of his head. It had a small brass dish and a pointed antenna feeding into a wire that ran down to a control pack in his vest pocket, but it appeared the device was malfunctioning, as he didn’t seem to realise Hero was calling to him.
‘Rowan! Rowan!’ she persisted, failing to get his attention until she was standing right in front of him. When he finally spotted her, his face burst from grief to joy.
‘Hero girl! As I live and long to levitate! I’d all but given up hope that yeh’d return in time,’ he said in a thick mountainfolk accent as he grabbed her in a hug, which she showed no hesitation in returning. When they parted, he cast a curious eye over the strangers gathered before him.
‘And who might these lads be?’
‘Rowan Cloudshadow, this is Ganymede Drake and Josiah Sarif, my Bladebound brethren, and Edgar Greyson, our steward.’
‘An honour to meet yeh all,’ he said, shaking each of their wrists in turn. ‘Despite the circumstances of the day.’
‘And you, sir,’ Drake replied. ‘Any friend of Hero’s is a friend of ours.’
Rowan looked quietly amused at being referred to as ‘sir’, though he didn’t correct it. Instead it was Hero who spoke, asking the question that had clearly been eating at her since Stormport. ‘Rowan – what happened? Your letter didn’t say …’
‘About that,’ Rowan’s face paled as he glanced around from beneath a troubled brow. ‘Blade’s Edge Acres is much changed, even in the two short seasons since you left for Tower Town. Trust is a commodity in short supply. I hope it’s something to which you can lay a claim.’ He gave a subtle nod to Joss and the others.
Hero looked them over, then turned back to Rowan. ‘A claim I’d stake my life on,’ she told him.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘Because I suspect –’
An excited whoop sounded as a gang of three Blade’s Edge prentices galloped past atop their sabretooth mounts, their humming knives tapping out a staccato rhythm against their riding leathers. They were led by a wiry young man who looked to be the same age as Hero and Drake, but who was only Joss’s height. His ashy blond hair was cropped close to the scalp, with a single forelock braid swinging alongside a cat’s tooth earring. As he passed by, he bared a mouthful of pebbly teeth at Rowan in something that lay between a grin and a snarl.
‘Don’t cry too hard, Cloudshadow! You’ll fry that contraption on the side of your noggin!’
The sneering prentice and his gang burst into a hail of laughter that was silenced when Hero turned her gaze on them. ‘Lynch,’ she said. ‘Contemptuous as ever.’
‘You’re back,’ Lynch replied, stopping his mount to stare down at Hero with violent intensity. His companions loitered behind him, looking to Joss more like a convict line-up than a pair of young prentices. The one on the left was a slab of solid muscle almost too big for the beast carrying him. The one on the right was even smaller and weedier than their ringleader, with bulging eyes that blinked out of unison. The Brute and the Newt, Joss dubbed them as Lynch went on, ‘I should have known Haven’s pet would come running at the news.’
‘And I should have known you’d have so little respect for the head of your order that you and your cronies would cause a ruckus on the day of his funeral,’ Hero shot back.
A cruel smile crept across Lynch’s face. ‘Funeral?’ he sniggered. ‘That ain’t Lord Haven they’re burning. You missed that. They incinerated him soon as the body was found. Couldn’t let it fester, could they? That black smoke sullying the sky is just from the rags they’ve set alight for all the Skyend commoners and the uppity heartlanders attending his wake – the ones who’ve come to filch our meat and mead. Did Cloudshadow not tell you?’
Hero’s jaw clenched so tight, Joss swore he could hear her teeth grinding.
Lynch’s smile toxified into something even more poisonous. ‘Guess not,’ he said, leading his mount away with his cackling cohorts follow
ing close behind. ‘Enjoy the festivities, Villain! Hyah!’
In a stampede of paws they rode out through the gate, playing truant on a day of mourning. Their hooting and hollering echoed over the fortress walls as Drake turned his sympathetic eyes on Hero.
‘“Villain”?’ he asked.
Hero wriggled as if shaking off the confrontation. ‘Creative with his taunts, isn’t he?’
‘Pay ’em no mind, Hero girl,’ Rowan told her. ‘For now yeh should take yer friends and go say yer farewells, while yeh still have the chance.’
‘Farewells, Rowan? To a pile of burnt rags?’ Hero asked. ‘Why would they cremate him so fast?’
‘There’ll be time enough for all that later. Be what it may, yeh’ll regret it if yeh don’t go up there. I’ll organise some hands to help get yer animals penned and watered. Yeh’ll find most everyone’s still gathered on the eastward bastion.’
Hero thanked Rowan for his help before leading Joss and the others through the gates and into the fortress’s main courtyard. It looked like a procession had been held here; the paving was scattered with wildflowers, and Joss could imagine the sight of the colourful petals raining down. Now they’d been crushed underfoot. And all in tribute to an empty funeral litter, if they were to believe what Lynch had said.
‘So who exactly was that muck-for-a-mind back there?’ Joss asked as they walked across the courtyard.
‘And why did he have such a great big trilobite up his bum?’ added Edgar.
‘Lynch? He’s always been a cactus-sucker,’ Hero replied, wrinkling her nose. ‘But he’s been particularly sore ever since I beat him for the nomination to go on the Way. Not that it’s ever occurred to him that it was because I could fly circles around him any day of the week, and thrice on Kingsday. I’ve found the less mind you pay him, the better off you’ll be.’
‘Even with what he had to say about Lord Haven?’ said Drake, following Joss’s own train of thought.
Hero stiffened. ‘Rowan was right. There’ll be time to get to the bottom of that later.’
The prentices came to the first set of staircases that wrapped all around the keep with no discernible order. Bridges and walkways led up and up, splitting off in several directions before coming together again, forging a haphazard path into the skies above. The only constant in all this winding confusion was the black tower that protruded from the centre of the fortress grounds like a spiked gauntlet.
‘The Lord’s Keep,’ Hero explained, and Joss looked up from the steps rising in front of him to examine it. Back home at Round Shield Ranch, Lord Malkus’s residence was in the bowels of the fortress, discreet and secure. So it was unusual to see such a conspicuous seat of power, the fist at the top clearly where his lordship’s quarters were located.
‘I’ve never seen so many guards posted inside a paldero order before,’ Joss said, noting the armed sentries dotted around the base of the Lord’s Keep and throughout the grounds. They weren’t dressed like any other order members; their armour was heavier, their helmets bulkier. They carried shockrods and bolt rifles and daggers instead of song swords or humming knives, their faces a parade of officious solemnity.
‘Neither have I,’ said Hero, eyeballing the unexpected presence. Most paladero orders entrusted themselves with their own security, rarely employing outsiders for such a task. It led Joss to wonder if the augmented defences were a response to the same threat that had conjured forth all those Messenger statues in the surrounding forest.
Darkness take us all. The chant called out to him unbidden, chilling him all the way down to his marrow.
The stairwell wove on and up and around to loom high above the fortress grounds, providing a pterosaur’s-eye view of all the pens and enclosures, silos and towers, gardens and courtyards. It felt like five castles all folded in on top of each other, stacked high and hovering atop the mountain range, with the prentices struggling to reach the apex.
‘Do these stairs ever end?’ Joss huffed, wiping the sweat from his brow.
Without Hero acting as their guide, Joss, Drake and Edgar would have been hopelessly lost, but she was as certain in her sense of direction as she was tireless, and finally they came to their destination.
The battlement jutted out into the air as if it had been built on the edge of the world itself, with a small pavilion casting shade along its large tiled walkway. And there, stacked high in the centre of the balcony, was what they’d rushed all this way to see: the funeral pyre, spitting cinders into the sky as blackened logs crumpled beneath each other’s weight, a burned mass smouldering at its heart.
Hero’s face fell. With a wavering hand she removed her hat, and her dark hair took to the wind like a raven let loose from its cage.
‘He’s really gone,’ she whispered.
Silently, with her brethren beside her, she stood and watched the fires burn.
CHAPTER SIX
A FUNERAL WITHOUT A BODY
JOSS stared at the blackened mass that crackled within the flames and sagged with defeat. Lynch hadn’t lied. In place of a body, blankets had been knotted together in the shape of a man and stuffed with straw for burning. A funeral without a body wasn’t an unusual occurrence for a paladero. Too often their kind were devoured by feral beasts or lost in the wild. But for a lord to be cremated ahead of his funeral service and the subsequent wake was unusual, to say the least. Not that the crowd gathered to watch this symbolic gesture seemed too unsettled by that fact.
Small groups of paladeros and prentices were standing around the pyre, most of them bearing the sigil of Blade’s Edge Acres – its three mountain peaks in the shape of a crown being challenged by a trio of pterosaurs flying in a trident formation. For all his lordship’s loyal followers, there were almost as many visiting dignitaries, with Joss recognising the emblems of more than a dozen other paladero orders.
Joss was surprised by the presence of all these other thunderfolk. Like Starlight Fields, Blade’s Edge Acres was one of the more remote paladero orders, located far outside the boundaries of Thunder Realm. He hadn’t realised that its lord had been so widely respected to warrant such a wake. Perhaps the depth of Hero’s sorrow should have given him a clue.
‘Hero?’ Drake asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she tried in vain to smooth down her hair, which flew about wildly as she approached the pyre. Knelt. Bowed her head. Whispered things only the flames could hear.
Joss watched her, then watched the crowd watching her. They were staring at her, assessing her grief as they milled about like this was any other social function. Like they were waiting for their fancy drinks and finger food to arrive.
But two faces in the crowd showed no sign of this aloof demeanour, and their appearance took Joss by surprise. Standing at the far end of the battlement, just beyond the flames, was not only his mentor, Sur Verity, but also the leader of Round Shield Ranch himself, Lord Malkus. They looked just as Joss remembered them: steely and distinguished, Sur Verity’s eyepatch ornamenting her signature scowl, Lord Malkus’s silver teeth flashing in the fading sunlight.
They were both engaged in hushed, half-hearted pleasantries with their fellow paladeros, emblems marking the visitors as being from as far away as Rampart Run and Copperhide Gulch. Joss felt a rush of nerves at seeing his two mentors, wondering what they would make of him being here.
‘Ganymede, can you excuse me for a minute?’ Joss said, turning to Drake before nodding in Hero’s direction. ‘You’ll keep an eye on her – make sure she’s all right?’
‘Always,’ his friend said.
Slipping away, Joss walked around the outer edge of the gathering, passing the murmuring crowd until he stood a few feet behind the two paladeros. Sensing his presence, Sur Verity turned around while Lord Malkus continued talking to the other guests.
‘Josiah,’ she said, regarding him in her typically hard, martial manner. ‘You’re looking …’
The words hung uncomfortably in the air as she searched for a way to fin
ish her thought. They kept hanging.
Coughing, Joss decided not to wait for her. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here. It’s like Tower Town all over again,’ he said, referring to the brief reunion they’d had after he and his brethren had completed the Way. Thinking back on that day, he remembered Sur Verity greeting him with what had felt a lot like pride. Her manner was unmistakably different now. Perhaps it had to do with the unfortunate reason for their meeting. Perhaps it was something else.
‘Is that Josiah Sarif?’ a deep voice asked, and Lord Malkus turned to join the conversation. ‘How are you, lad? Doing your order proud?’
‘I hope so, my lord.’
‘Glad to hear it. And the road is treating you well?’
‘As well as can be expected. I was just saying to Sur Verity that it’s good to see you both. Despite the circumstances …’
Joss looked again at the pyre, as did Sur Verity and Lord Malkus. They watched as Hero stood and shuffled back beside Drake, who wrapped a supportive arm around her shoulders.
‘I remember Lord Haven from the Tournament. The first time I won the Gauntlet,’ Sur Verity said, her tone hushed and reverential as her one good eye reflected the light of the flames. ‘He was one of the most gracious men I ever met.’
‘Not to mention a fierce opponent,’ added Lord Malkus. ‘I faced off against him in too many Gauntlets to count. He was forever on my back or at my side, making me work twice as hard for every win I ever counted.’
‘I never knew him,’ Joss had to admit. ‘I didn’t realise how well-respected he was.’
‘He hasn’t travelled in a long time. Too occupied with his responsibilities to venture far beyond his order. Though I hear his health took a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse while he was preparing for a journey,’ said Lord Malkus.
The Edge of the World Page 3
