Hero Risen (Seeds of Destiny, Book 3)

by Andy Livingstone

  Hero Risen

  ANDY LIVINGSTONE

  HarperVoyager

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

  Copyright © Andrew Livingstone 2017

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017.

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  Andrew Livingstone asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

  Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008106034

  Version: 2017-04-24

  For Valerie

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Andy Livingstone

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  He paused before the door, running his fingertips slowly down the wood smoothed as much by years as by the plane, letting them fall into the curving groove of the traditional mark of luck in its centre. He was prolonging the moment.

  The sounds of early evening were all around him, stark in the deserted village, but he heard none. The smells of dusk drifted over him, but he noticed none. Still he stayed his hand from pushing the door.

  It was a strange mix of feelings that coursed through him on the final night of a story:

  Nerves – that he might not do justice to those whose tale he told.

  Pleasure – that the crowd waited on his words: the result of his efforts the previous two nights.

  Sadness – that tonight this telling would come to an end.

  And eagerness – a quickening of heart and breath. He would be drawn into the telling, the exhilaration confining his awareness within each moment and shortening time.

  It was always so.

  It was, these days, what he lived for. Keeping the past alive. Ensuring the deeds he had witnessed did not drift and fade with the shifting winds of memory. Helping the lessons of before to be learnt afresh, the mistakes understood, the heroics and sacrifices appreciated.

  He pushed on the door, letting the remaining light spill within and hush the murmur of the throng. He moved inside, his adjusting eyes revealing rings of faces turned his way. Close by, one caught his eye. A boy who had decried the stories outside the hall on the first night; the challenging cynicism in his voice now replaced by eager anticipation in his eyes.

  He stepped forward.

  He was a storyteller. And he had a story to tell.

  Chapter 1

  She sat beside him each afternoon now. Two high-backed chairs were paired on the balcony, fine sand gathering around their short legs of finely carved wood.

  It was curious how change eased its way into your life before awareness caught up. He could not remember when her companionship had become routine; he could only recall the day when, with her called on other business, it had seemed strange that she was not there.

  The other servants made no comment. They would not dare, of course, in his presence but he knew from his sources that her companionship provided no domestic scuttlebutt in the corridors. Why would it? Nobles, in particular, royals, had a habit of demanding services far more intimate from servants. Gossip is not born in the commonplace.

  Her whisper drifted in the baking air. ‘You hate this.’

  ‘The heat?’ He snorted. ‘It is the only weather I know.’

  ‘Not the heat, as you know quite well.’ It was uncanny how a hoarse monotone could yet convey chastisement. ‘The waiting.’

  He rested his head against the chair and raised his eyes to the deepness of the sky. The same sky that sat above all countries, above all people, and some more specific than others. ‘You think you can read my mind, crone, but you are wrong. Not the waiting. Waiting lies within the course of every strategy.’ He frowned at the sky. ‘I hate the not knowing.’

  She gave a soft grunt. ‘And the not controlling.’

  ‘I would that I could control you and your prattling tongue.’

  It was even more irritating when she did not reply. He let the silence draw out, as if it had not irked him.

  ‘And you miss him.’

  He cursed inwardly, as much at the involuntary start her words had given him as at the suspicion that she could read his mind after all. He turned slowly and looked at her for a long moment. Her gaze never wavered from the horizon but the slightest twitch at the corner of her mouth hinted that she was aware of his stare.

  ‘On pain of death, do not ever say that in the presence of anyone,’ he rasped. ‘Especially him.’

  ****

  Pain thumping and rebounding within his skull, Brann forced open his eyes and found himself lying in hell.

  The stench of gore was so pervasive that he could taste it filling his throat; enough to make him retch, had he not become accustomed to the sensation that seemed half a lifetime before. He heaved at a body – cold, clammy, and limp and as naked as he felt himself to be – to force its weight away from his chest. It slipped from him with a wet slither, allowing him to drag in a breath of welcome depth. Pain flared across his ribs as he sucked in the air, but a pain of a battering and, thankfully, not of broken bone. It was not so much the breaking that worried him, but the piercing and tearing it so often caused inside. Bones could mend, but blood coughed up all too often prophesied the end. He twisted, feeling lifeless limbs shift beneath him, to look further around. He was in a pit as deep into the dry crumbling earth as his father’s mill had been tall. The darkness of night above was tinged with the glow of fires beyond the lip and either the flames or the moon or both combined to lessen the gloom just enough to reveal the silhouettes of arms and legs and bodies and heads, a layer of nightmare shapes with the promise of more hidden beneath.

  Low voices approached and Brann lay still, tense and alert. A glow grew brighter at the lip of the pit until the flickering light of a torch brought the detail of the scene around him to his eyes in all its stark gore. Faces stared back at him, some hacked almost beyond recognition as human, while others appeared ready to start a conversation until he saw the eyes, cold and dead as stone. Limbs were strewn at angles, attached still to bodies or not; skin was rent and pierced, and everywhere, coating all, was blood, a dark lubricant that saw the corp
ses – stripped of everything whether of value or none – shift as, with a scrape of movement at the edge of the pit and a harsh slap on impact, another body was flung onto the pile.

  A long moment of silence and shifting shadows was broken by a grunt of satisfaction.

  ‘That’ll do for today. Tomorrow will see us fill it enough to put the dirt back in over them, then we’ve done our bit. I’ll put the stew on to heat, and you two can start sorting their gear. We’ll divide it once we’ve eaten.’

  A harsh laugh and a younger voice: ‘Sounds good to me. It’s hungry work, this. Bodies are heavier than I thought.’

  A third voice: ‘But worth it for the loot. Don’t matter that the bodies are heavy when the loot pays you back. You city cut-throats are all the same when you come to this – you don’t realise you can’t just leave the dead in an alley for the watch guards to pick up in the morning. Now you know why I told you it’s good to stick with the sergeant who’s the best cheat at dice. Won us a pit to fill, didn’t he?’

  The first voice was further away, presumably at the stew pot: ‘Say again that I cheat and you’ll be in the pit yourself and as dead as the others.’ The sergeant finished with a barked laugh.

  The torchlight started to recede but Brann forced himself to lie still; steeling himself against rising bile at the feeling of a cold arm pressing against his face, and waiting until the pit returned to safe darkness. The voices were still relatively close.

  ‘Of course, boss. You’re just very good at it. But before you start rolling those dice again, I want my name on those black weapons.’

  Brann’s eyes jerked wide open.

  The sergeant’s voice: ‘Good try, but we all do. I’ll take the sword. You bastards can roll the dice for the axe and knife.’

  The young voice: ‘I am happy with the knife.’ A snicker of a laugh. ‘I like knife work.’

  ‘And the axe is fine for me. So we’re agreed. We can roll for the rest.’

  The sergeant grunted. ‘You can sort the rest now, or the food will be ready before you’re done. Get your arses over here. You can use the knife tomorrow. At least the black one won’t take you four tries to cut a throat like that blunt apology for a blade you were using today.’

  Brann growled as rage flared, overwhelming the horror and disgust prompted by the gore-smeared bodies pressing around him. He made to rise, but his left arm gave way beneath him as a shock of pain ran from his elbow into his shoulder. He could make out the dark shape of a wound on the arm, and a burning on the side of his ribs led tentative fingers to the split skin of another long gash. Either the bash on his head that was causing the headache or the loss of blood had been the reason he had passed out and appeared dead. Either way, it had saved him from being finished off by a looter’s blade. He had to hope it hadn’t been blood loss, or the strength to even escape the pit would have drained from him with it. He grunted softly. There was only one way to find out. The pain wasn’t enough to stop him from forcing movement had it been necessary, but while he had another good arm, there was no need.

  Brann rolled to his right and pushed himself against a torso, chest hair slick and matted with blood and the jagged end of a rib pressing against his hand, and levered himself into a crouch. He tested his legs beneath him. They ached, but only through the stiffness of immobility. Hands and feet slipping and slithering on corpses, he moved towards the side of the pit. The body parts shifting beneath him made progress awkward, but the slick covering of stinking fluids saw them move quietly – just a squelch or a small slap as cold flesh met cold flesh. With almost every movement, his foot, then a hand, then a foot slipped between bodies – corpses that clung on, unwilling to let him go. His head told him that they were dead, that they were empty pieces of meat and bone, that they could not hurt him. But the feeling that they were trying to drag him down among them, to lose him in their midst and accept him as one of their own, overwhelmed him. Panic rose and he started to scrabble faster, one foot sinking even deeper into the grasping cadavers. He dragged in a gasp and forced himself to stop moving, desperately trying to control his impulses. He could feel his leg encased for most of its length against still, cold, wet dead skin. But it was the stillness that he forced his thoughts to accept. While he didn’t move, nothing else did. There were no spirits trying to pull him into their embrace, no fingers grabbing his ankles. He slowed his breathing and withdrew his leg gradually, pushing down within him the revulsion at the feeling of what it slid against. He was no stranger to death or broken bodies; the gods only knew how many he had caused and the brutality involved. But those were dealt with in the moment, reaction and action born of necessity, and driven by the urge at the core of nature to survive. This was the cold eternity of death, and it reminded him of everything he fought to avoid. He blew out a slow breath and moved slowly, each movement placed with deliberate care. A face, eyes dull but staring, almost allowed the panic back in, but he forced his concentration away from what the bodies had been and made his eyes see them as nothing more than a surface to cross. The entire journey was no more than the length of two long spears but to his straining nerves it seemed the distance of an arrow-shot. He glanced ahead – he was almost there. A leg that bridged unseen between two bodies snapped under his weight, the splintered end of the shin puncturing the side of his heel. He caught his balance by throwing himself at the pit wall, bracing his good arm against it and finding it steep. Stomach heaving, he twisted and wrenched free the broken shin bone. He let his vomit go; there was no point in fighting it in this hellhole. Most of the bone was intact, and he stabbed the jagged end into the wall, using it to pull himself up, injured arm dangling and one foot finding a root that protruded enough to let him push against it, dried earth rubbing against his front and mixing with the gore that coated every part of him. His arm found the lip and, legs scrambling behind him, he dragged himself over.

  The nightmare apparition – naked body, heaving chest, and snarling face caked and smeared and matted in mud and blood, and broken bone in hand – that he must have presented as he rose to his feet, eyes glaring from a head lowered from effort and shoulders hanging low to one side to favour the left arm held tight to his chest, was reflected in the dread filling the stare of the man who must have been the sergeant. The man froze, a ladle dropping against a rock with a dull clang that alerted his companions.

  His reaction stopped the other two also, despite their backs being towards Brann, giving him a moment to absorb what lay before him. The sergeant, crouched beside a steaming pot suspended over a fire, was a wiry veteran, with little hair and fewer teeth. The fact that he had reached this age told of skill with arms or ruthless guile, either of which was as dangerous as the other. The other two, a skinny youth and a taller man, broad of shoulder and girth, were closer to him and had been moving items from a heap of all the plunder stripped from the bodies and sorting them into smaller specific piles.

  ‘Son of a poxy whore,’ the sergeant breathed.

  The other two turned.

  The youth’s eyes widened, and his voice was shrill. ‘The dead. Gods save us. The dead are rising.’ He had been handing Brann’s axe to the other man when Brann’s appearance had frozen them, and it hung forgotten in his hand.

  Brann growled at the sight.

  The broad man tried to speak, his mouth working soundlessly.

  Brann started towards them, the stiffness easing from his legs with every step. His movement broke through the men’s shock but, before it could turn to panic, the sergeant recovered enough of his senses to growl at the other two.

  ‘Back-from-the-dead or never-dead, make sure the bastard stays dead this time. I want a head to fall.’

  The boy hefted the axe but still hung back, waiting for his companion to move. Clearly the sort who preferred his victims with their backs to him. His voice was still high and shaking. ‘Should we get help?’

  The brute beside him grabbed the nearest weapons to hand: a halberd with a broken tip and an axe-blade with
more nicks than edge, but no less dangerous for either. ‘And let them demand a share of our loot in return? Help me gut him and we’ll get our dinner in peace.’

  Brann’s eyes narrowed. For all his initial dumbness, this one’s nerves had steadied the quickest. He was the first threat. He angled his approach towards the youth, panicking the boy even more as he fixed him with a stare that seemed intent on him alone. With a roar, the burly man shouldered the youth to the side, sending him staggering, and raised the pole of the halberd high to strike.

  Brann’s grin was savage. They may be useless and unskilled, or they may be anything but. Regardless, they were better one at a time. ‘Got you,’ he said, his voice rough and dry.

  The man’s eyes widened in surprise, for an instant, before he started to swing the weapon. In that instant, Brann was inside his swing and the jagged end of the shin bone had buried half of its length up under his ribs. Brann had spun away and towards the youth, the bone pulling with it a sprayed crescent of blood before the body had even started to collapse. A wild swing of the axe, born of panic, was easily avoided and the bone was left a hand’s width deep in the youth’s throat as Brann closed his fingers around the familiar haft of his axe and pulled it from already nerveless fingers.

  The sergeant spat and crouched, a sword drawn back in readiness. ‘You won’t catch me by surprise, bastard.’

  Brann stepped forward and, in a blur, raised the axe high with both hands, gritting his teeth against the sharp agony of the stretched wound along his ribs. As the man swung his sword up to parry the downwards swing, Brann changed to slide one hand up towards the dark metal of the head of the weapon, grasping the wood and slamming the shaft end first into the man’s face. The sergeant barely had time to register his smashed nose and shattered teeth before the axe swung and his head bounced in the dirt beyond the firelight.