by Sarah Remy
Mal lit a taper from the hearth and held it over the mattress, carefully away from the folds of the embroidered canopy. Avani felt a swell of appreciation for the man’s attentiveness, then remembered Cleena and squelched friendly feelings with a growl.
“Someone splinted her fingers,” she reported after a moment of careful examination. “But before that someone else broke them beyond any chance of proper healing. I think I can beat back infection, given time, and save the hands, if I’m very lucky. But she’ll not have use of them again.”
“Don’t waste your medicines on knitting bone,” advised Baldebert. “She’s desert ilk. Wounds like that and captured to boot—she’ll let herself die, or find a way to hasten the end first chance she gets. They have no interest in living with failure.”
“She’s employable to me dead or alive,” Mal reminded Baldebert wryly. He touched Avani’s shoulder before she could protest. His reluctant empathy ran warm through their link and in her veins. “But let’s do what we can to keep her alive. I’ll arrange a guard to keep watch once Avani’s finished.”
Avani paused in undoing splints. “She’s to stay here, in your chambers?”
“This is the safest place for her. If what Faolan told me is at all true, we’d best keep her a secret from the temple a while longer.”
“The barrowman was in no better shape,” said Avani, baffled. “In fact, nearly identical. But you kept it in a catacomb cell from the very beginning.”
Mal’s fine dark brows rose in confusion.
“A barrowman is not human, Avani,” he said. He held the taper over the woman to better see her face. “She may be our enemy, but as of yet we cannot assume she is a monster.”
“Once she wakes,” Baldebert predicted, selecting a plump fig from the bowl of fruit on Mal’s writing desk, and cleaning it on his sleeve, “you’ll soon change your mind.”
Chapter 4
Everin waited a day on Skerrit’s Pass.
Come dawn he studied the desert from the top of his great-grandfather’s watchtower, trying to learn about the army camped below as daylight painted the eastern side of the mountains white and yellow and gold. He knew a few things from time spent in service on the sand, and so the legion on the wasteland alarmed him.
He knew, for instance, that the sand snakes were a proud and independent people, distrustful of change. Fiercely loyal to family and godhead, rarely did they stay long under a single lord’s banner, preferring to wander the vast badlands in small, unruly tribes, trading amongst themselves, enrolling in service only when coin was of short supply.
“Are there cities?” Drem asked. The lesser sidhe had not attempted to hurry Everin in his contemplation, instead spending hours rooting about the rocky cauldron that was Skerrit’s Pass and nosing around the depths of the old tower. It still wore the form of a desert woman—long limbed, dark skinned, and yellow eyed. Everin found the facade disconcerting.
“Aye. Cities of canvas, tent post, and brick. Up for a generation, moved on in the next. A lord reigns where her banner flies—sooner or later she will grow bored of the same sand and brush and move on to the next place.”
Drem propped its elbows atop the tower battlements. Midday sun gilded the sand, obscuring the desert floor in lambent haze.
“And now they wish to see the other side of the mountains,” it predicted.
“It happens.” Everin cringed at the sound of his butchered voice. Thanks to Faolan’s skill the wound across his throat was all but healed, the flesh knitted into place. But his speech had yet to fully recover; the best he could manage was a rough whisper. He took some hope in that it no longer hurt to make words, but that seemed flimsy solace when a man could not make himself easily heard.
Drem waited, head tilted in invitation.
“The last time was in my grandfather’s age,” Everin continued, scuffing his foot meaningfully against tower stone, “the time before that, sidhe still walked above ground and helped beat them back. That was in advance of Wilhaiim’s white walls; flatlanders were farm folk, more intent on surviving than laying claim. Or so I was taught in my youth. You don’t remember?”
Drem demurred. “I am not so old as that,” it said. “Faolan might recall. The elders certainly would, should they ever stir themselves to care.”
“Time, and time past, the sand snakes have tried and failed. Roused, routed, and returned to their desert.” He pursed his lips. “There were not so many of them before.”
“Once there were not so many of you,” Drem retorted. “Mortals breed like rabbits.”
It stalked off, Desma’s kilt swinging, bare feet slapping angrily on stone. Everin hoped it retained enough of Faolan’s magic to conjure sandals before they braved the burning sands.
“Come eat,” said Drem, returning later to the top of the tower, a small brace of fat fish looped over its elbow.
A deep, blue lake at the center of the cauldron provided the fish as well as fresh water for drinking. Drem was a clever swimmer, impervious to the icy temperature, and able to stay submerged for much longer than any mortal. Everin, who knew the sidhe barrows were crisscrossed with underground springs and rivers, was nevertheless impressed by Drem’s fortitude.
Still, he couldn’t help but grimace at the fish. “Once I promised myself I’d never again eat raw meat.” He meant On the day I escaped sidhe tunnels for the open air.
Drem was not sympathetic. “Optimistic,” it said. It gnashed its teeth, the sidhe pantomime startling on a human face. Then it grinned. “Come down,” it coaxed. “I’ve made a fire.”
Everin started to protest the wisdom of risking a fire when an army lurked nearby, the mountainside no doubt lousy with scouts, but Drem cut him off.
“A small one,” it said. “In a place meant for hiding. They will not notice our smoke when so many other fires burn below.” Drem glanced over the battlements. The cliff side was now painted with the colors of midday—brown and green and amber—morning haze clearing from desert sands. Campfires were indeed plentiful, plumes of gray smoke visible in blue sky.
The fires were disturbing, not for their quantity, which Everin had expected, but for their consistency. There was an order to those gray plumes, camp fires burning in groups of exactly ten, that suggested everything he thought he knew about desert warfare had changed.
“Someone has your sand snakes in hand,” Drem agreed, noting Everin’s expression. “Can you discern the banners?”
“The color. Not the device.”
“Red starburst,” said Drem. “On a white background. Each of them, more than there are false stars beneath the skin of the earth.”
Everin frowned. Red starburst was not a device he remembered. As for false stars—the sidhe barrows were freckled with shards of mica and chunks of glittering yellow crystal. Drem was exaggerating, but not by much.
“Come eat.” Drem shook the fish, spattering Everin with cold lake water. “More wisdom in scheming on a full belly, or so Bail always said.”
Bail, one of Drem’s ferocious kin, had been killed on the way up the mountain, trampled by frightened horses beneath a stormy sky.
“I’m sorry,” Everin said. He turned away from the desert. “About Bail.”
“You said so once before.” Drem led the way into the tower. “Words won’t bring Bail back. Stop talking and walk faster. I’m hungry.”
The keep was not a comfortable place. It was spare, modestly constructed of gray stone and mountain boulder for the simple purpose of guarding the pass. A narrow stair ran up the very center. Animals and traveling tinkers had made use of the ground floor since its abandonment. Dried leaves, old embers, and broken crockery littered the packed earth. A macabre black vine, branches thick as a man’s wrist and petals large as trenchers, wrapped the building from top to bottom, obscuring old loopholes and most of the front entrance. Rot or scavengers had decimated the gate; heavy iron hinges, still attached to the stone lintel, were all that remained of once sturdy portals.
“Don
’t touch the branches,” Drem advised, ducking past low hanging vine. “They’re sticky, and the sap burns. Dark necromancy birthed that creeper. It’s foul.”
Everin didn’t doubt the sidhe’s assessment. A charred lumber cross stood witness in the cauldron near the edge of the lake, the rocks around it forever blackened. At least one necromancer had been executed there above two kingdoms, likely more than one. Before they were declared dangerous and ordered extinguished, the magi had been as much a king’s weapon as his Kingsmen. They’d lived and worked side by side with Wilhaiim’s best soldiers to keep the flatlands safe, from coast to mountain peak.
How surprised both soldiers and necromancers must have been, Everin thought, glancing sideways at the looming cross, to wake one morning and discover friend was now foe.
“This place exudes sorrow. I’ll be glad to be clear of it.”
Drem sidestepped the dampened earth outside the tower where Faolan had saved their desert captive by smothering her and then reviving her again. Streaks of the muddy potion the aes si had used stained the ground. Everin avoided the splotches with care.
Once out of the tower he could smell the smoke of Drem’s secret fire. Intrigued, he followed the lesser sidhe around the back of the building, turning sideways between vine and rock. There he discovered a pleasant hollow between tower wall and cauldron edge. The black vine provided leafy roof, hiding the niche from view. Someone had enlarged the hollow by digging into the side of the cauldron, excavating small boulders before using the rocks to line a little fire pit. A neat pile of tinder was stacked against the tower: sticks and scrub from the valley floor.
“This place is new,” Drem said. The lesser sidhe squatted near the fire. It went quickly to work on the fish, slitting all three head to tail and emptying their bellies with its fingers. “It stinks of men. Not tinkers. Tinkers know better than to collect yew for burning.” Drem made a face at the stacked kindling.
“Yew grows west of the mountains.” Everin peered about the hollow. “Every flatlander child knows better than to burn it for warmth or cooking.”
Drem skewered a fish on the point of its spear and passed the weapon to Everin. “Not too close to the flames,” it warned. “I’ll not lose my spear to your foibles.”
So saying, it bit the head off a second gutted fish, chewing with dramatic relish.
Everin ignored the sidhe’s mockery for the puzzle of the yew.
“This is a sand snake’s hole,” he hazarded while the meat on the spear began to smoke and spit. “They’ve gone back and forth over the mountain more than once. Gathered wood for kindling along the way, not knowing enough about western stock to avoid the poisonous variety.”
Drem grunted agreement. “Best sleep with one eye open tonight,” it advised. “A cozy lair like this one means regular traffic. They’ll be starting to wonder what has become of the two we took,” it added, licking grease from its fingers.
“Sleep now if you’re in need,” replied Everin. “Once the sun sets we move on.”
Drem rummaged the tower while Everin walked the cauldron’s perimeter. A shallow bowl scored into the mountain’s peak when some long-forgotten cataclysm had reshaped the surrounding pinnacles, Skerrit’s Pass provided an important vantage point from which to view the land east and west of the dividing range. The ground was stony, uneven, broken here and there by stubborn mountain grass. Fat white clouds raced over the lake’s placid surface, mirroring the busy sky above. While unforgiving wind scraped over mountaintops, the crater provided protection from all but the most wretched of storms.
Everin selected a stone from the ground between his feet. He flicked his wrist, skipping the pebble across the surface of the lake. Rings formed and expanded, breaking apart reflected sky. With a quiet plop the stone sank.
He’d seen the pass for the first time when he’d escaped sidhe imprisonment on the back of the winged dullahan. It had been a difficult task to convince the monster to flee the mounds. The creature—an aes si so ancient few remembered its existence—had extracted a promise in return. Everin, desperate for a taste of freedom, had agreed to the dullahan’s terms without much thought for consequences. He already belonged to the sidhe. At the time of his escape a second life debt atop the first seemed negligible.
Besides which, from boyhood he’d planned to die a hero the desert, had constructed a narrative in his head to rival even his tutor’s best tales.
But the dullahan had refused to take Everin into the desert. Their arrangement ended at the pass when the creature alighted on the edge of the crater, black wings beating beneath an angry moon, whip-like tail snapping against the rocks.
Here, it said in Everin’s skull, silver-bell tones a marked contrast to its grotesque form. The dullahan most commonly wore the head and torso of a mailed knight above the body of a large winged serpent. It smelled of leather and dust, and when it breathed it sounded like bones breaking. No further.
“This is not far enough,” Everin had protested. “I’m not safe here.”
The dullahan threw him off with a shake of its body. Everin landed hard on rocky ground, the air knocked from his lungs. The dullahan stretched its wings, blocking out the moon.
Get up and run, little king, it advised. The path is there: it winds down onto the sand. Don’t stray off the trail. The drop will kill you. Then it sprang into the sky, shedding scale and feather, leaving Everin alone at the top of the world.
The path was still there, if much disguised. Everin left the lakeshore for the eastern edge of the cauldron and perched atop a flat boulder near the trailhead. The sinking sun cast purple shadows across the cliff face. For the moment he had no fear of discovery. He could make out the high end of the trail for several leagues before it snaked down between two large rocks, dropping toward the desert floor. Until the sun shifted again, he’d glimpse anyone coming up the path long before they espied him in the shadows.
Evening turned the army into squares of light and dark, bare sand and tent lodges. The lodges were large enough each to sleep ten warriors pressed thigh to thigh. Everin recalled the close quarters clearly, but also the security he’d felt knowing the men and women in his tent would protect him with their lives.
A thrush whistled. Everin, who knew there were no such birds high up on the mountains, recognized the warning for what it was and didn’t jump when Drem scuttled up the side of the crater, settling on a nearby rock.
“They’ll see through you immediately,” Everin said mildly. “If you creep and scamper on all fours like that.”
Drem folded long legs beneath Desma’s kilt. “There are no eyes here but our own,” it said, “none to fool but you, and you know the game so there’s no pleasure in the fooling. As for eyes, I’ve found you an ensorcelled one.”
It tossed a short, narrow tube into the air between them. Everin caught the cylinder before it fell onto rock. It was light in his hand, made of bronze but for a thumb-sized silver knob set halfway down its length. When Everin turned the tube in his hands he saw that it tapered gently, narrowing at one end.
“Put that end to your eye,” said Drem. “Look through the glass.”
Everin did so and puffed surprise. He took the cylinder away from his eye, examining both ends. Then he peered through it again, enchanted and uneasy both. The metal tube showed him a slice of life half a league away as if it happened instead a finger’s breadth from his nose. When he swept it down the mountain along the trail, he saw a ground squirrel foraging for supper at the base of a stunted tree. The squirrel’s long whiskers twitched as it sniffed the dirt. Everin could count the tufts of hair on the tips of its pointed ears.
When he took the tube again from his eye, and looked down the path, he could not make out even the distant tree.
“Point it at the sand,” Drem suggested wryly. “Turn the knob until the image is clear. You’ll make out the very flecks of amber in their ugly yellow irises.”
Everin narrowed his own yellow eyes at the sidhe. “Hsst! Go take a
look at yourself in the lake: you’ll see an amber stare reflected back.”
Drem shrugged, unrepentant. Everin directed the tube at the army below. Drem hadn’t exaggerated. It took Everin three turns of the small silver knob to make the image come clear, but when at last it did he nearly fell off his seat in shock.
“A powerful mortal magic,” Drem intoned as Everin swept the cylinder back and forth over the desert below. “I found it in the tower kitchen, beneath a broken wine jug.”
The image jumped as the tube passed over white sand, then steadied when Everin pointed it at a darker square of desert encampment. Canvas snapped immediately into focus, as did several kilted warriors seated on their heels in the shade of the lodge.
“Not magic,” mused Everin. “This is a compound lens. The Black Coast whalers use such devices, I’m told, though I’ve never seen one. This is worth your weight in true gold.”
He moved the tube gingerly this way and that, counting heads. Four large tent lodges to a square, ten men to a lodge . . .
Frowning, Everin direct the lens at the next encampment, and then the next.
“They’re the same,” he said, when he was certain. “Each the same. Four lodges—forty warriors—stationed in a single camp.” He set the lens carefully on the rock near his thigh before regarding the mosaic of darkening purple below.
Drem appeared taken aback. It rubbed a finger along Desma’s lower lip, gaze hooded.
“Very many angry scorpions,” it grumbled, borrowed yellow eyes flickering back and forth over the vista. “Even Faolan would not have guessed so many.”
“Ten thousand warriors,” Everin agreed in growing disbelief. “All of the desert in one place—impossible.”
“Obviously not. But there is good news.”
Everin quirked a brow.
“There are far too many to come up and over,” the lesser sidhe said. “I am right. Faolan was wrong. They plan to go under. And we shall stop them.”
“There are two of us,” Everin said, in case Drem needed reminding. “Against ten thousand. We need a plan of our own, I think.” He added wryly, “No matter how skillful, your disguise will do us little good in the face of so many if we but wander in circles looking for a sidhe gate that may or may not be nearby.”
