by David Hair
One of Rhamp’s outriders passed him, careful to give him a salute. Kemara Solus was engrossed with the pair of pregnant women currently riding in her cart; she’d handed over Beca’s reins to a young boy who was taking his duties very seriously indeed. Three carts down, he found Varahana’s wagon, driven by a villager while she sat in the back teaching half a dozen children aged around six or seven their letters. Her usually ironic expression had vanished; she looked cheery and animated, reflecting the lively joy on the children’s faces. It made him smile to see it – and again when he spotted Vidar riding nearby; more puppy than wolf when Vara was around.
I still don’t think it’ll happen . . . She’s a priestess first, and however she ended up in the Church, she does take her vows seriously.
Beyond them, he found a cluster of younger horsemen gathered around Cal Foaley, listening avidly as the hunter gave them their orders for the day. Amongst the dozen or so riders was Zar, dressed like a young man, as always. His frown deepened when he saw that Banno Rhamp was beside her. He watched silently as Foaley rattled out a string of orders, dividing them into fours and sending them out to relieve the wider patrols for the afternoon, then called, ‘Zar?’ as she readied to leave with her patrol.
She glared back, a defiant Don’t you dare embarrass me look on her face.
Foaley joined him. ‘Raythe, what’s up?’
‘Morning, Cal. What’s Zar doing here? I told her she was to stay in camp today.’
Foaley scratched his nose thoughtfully, then said laconically, ‘She’s as good a rider as any. Better’n most.’
‘That’s not the point. There are men in this camp I’d as soon she was nowhere near.’
‘She holds her own. The lads are giving her a wide berth: they know she’s got the praxis and fact is, they’re scared of her now – and more than a little proud, most of ’em.’
Raythe frowned at Banno. ‘Some aren’t giving her a wide enough berth at all.’
‘Him? He’s a good lad. How old’s the girl? Fifteen? Most folks would call that a good age to be wed. Best way to stop worrying about your daughter is to marry her off, make her someone else’s problem.’
‘Marry her off? Are you mad? Do you know—Never mind. Listen, we’ve been travelling since she was twelve and I won’t countenance such a thing until we’re back where we belong.’
‘Could be a long old wait,’ Foaley remarked. ‘You want to end up with no grandchildren?’
Raythe bit his lip. He’d not really thought of it that way. But Zar was noble-born, and Otravian nobility at that, far above some Pelarian mercenary. ‘When the time and place – and the suitor – is right, I’ll consider it.’
‘Good. Then in the meantime, I’ve some outriders who need relieving.’
Raythe harrumphed, then relented. ‘Very well. But keep an eye on her.’
Foaley gave him a wry salute, then trotted back to his protégés. He placed Banno and Zar on different patrols, so after a sharp staring contest with his daughter, Raythe let it go.
She’s going to grow up, whether I like it or not.
With a sharp ‘Yar!’ Zar spurred her mount and pelted off, and Raythe watched them go with an odd sensation in his heart. She might be his fledgling, but she’d fly away all too soon.
*
Freedom was a galloping horse tearing across the plains. The other riders in the patrol were left far behind as Zar sped over the frost-rimed gravel. She’d been petrified her father would order her return to the wagon in front of everyone and been ready to erupt with defiance – but thankfully, Foaley had stood by her and her father had backed down.
With Adefar swooping alongside her, she felt like her life was her own now, that things were finally turning her way. ‘Whatever the world throws at us, we’re ready,’ she told the spirit, even though she knew it wouldn’t understand her.
After a while she slowed and let the others catch up. Their leader, a straggle-haired hunter called Xan Lynski, called, ‘Stay with the group, girl,’ with nervous authority, as if he feared what she’d do, but she recognised that Lynski knew more about the trail than she did, so she obeyed with good grace.
The other two finally steamed up – Rolfus Bohrne, one of Rhamp’s men, and the blacksmith’s third son, Ando Borger, flushed with exertion and the sting of the frigid wind on their faces.
‘We’ve got the vanguard today,’ Lynski reminded them, ‘so we’ll relieve Morro’s patrol and scout ahead through the afternoon, camp for the night and re-join the caravan tomorrow morning. First though, I’m going to say this straight up: anyone laying a finger on Zar will lose their fecking hand. You want a woman, you pay one of Gravis’ women. Got it?’
‘We get ’em for free,’ Rolfus Bohrne smirked. ‘Anyways, money’s changed hands on her already.’
‘What?’ Lynski snapped.
Zarelda stared as Bohrne kicked his horse into motion and rode off, crossing paths with another rider who appeared over the ridge to their north. Her heart thudded as she recognised Banno’s brown mount, but her initial exultation blended with indignation as she thought, So, ‘money’s changed hands’, has it? We’ll see about that.
Lynski looked like he was contemplating putting a shaft in Bohrne’s back, then he turned his simmering glare on Banno as he cantered up. ‘By the Pit, what’s going on?’
‘Change of plan,’ Banno said. ‘I’ve been reassigned to your patrol.’
Lynski scowled, then looked skywards. ‘Right then, follow,’ he called, leading the way towards the coastal range.
Banno fell in beside Zar. ‘Hey there.’
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘I know Foaley didn’t sanction any change of patrol.’
‘What he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have to.’ Banno smiled. ‘I just wanted to be with you.’
Her heart thumped and she had to swallow before asking, ‘Are your brothers healing?’
‘Poel is fine. Your father was merciful. But he’s got your hand-print on his face for life.’
She coloured and admitted, ‘It was an accident – I thought I was fighting for my life and it just happened.’
‘Honestly, I don’t blame you,’ Banno said. ‘It’s good you can protect yourself.’
‘I’ve barely dipped my toes in the water,’ she answered, not wanting to scare him off. ‘I have a million things to learn.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘A whole new language, for one, although really, I’ve been learning it for years. Old Magnian’s the language of the praxis, and I need it to command my familiar.’
He looked around. ‘A familiar?’
‘He’s called Adefar. He’s being a bird at the moment. You can’t see him, but he’s circling above us.’
Banno looked around blindly, then asked, ‘Why Old Magnian?’
‘So Adefar knows I’m talking to him. Otherwise he’d act on everything I said, which would be disastrous.’
‘I guess it would!’ Banno laughed. ‘What can you do?’
‘Not so much, right now.’ She paused, then asked shyly, ‘Do you really want to know this stuff?’ At his eager nod, she grinned and started, ‘Well, there’s three parts to the praxis: Proteus – that’s about one’s own body; Menteus, which is about our mind, and Mundius, which is about our world. An initiate like me starts with one, but eventually I’ll learn them all. Some specialise, others stay general.’
Banno looked both impressed and apprehensive. She decided she quite liked that.
‘Which are you learning first?’ he asked.
‘Mundius. Soon I’ll be able to make fire and quench it, purify water, shape the earth, make plants grow, that sort of thing. In the empire, I’d have been sent to an Arcanus Academia to learn it all, but out here, it’s just Father and me.’
‘And the healer too,’ Banno reminded her.
She didn’t understand Kemara’s reluctance to learn, but she remembered just in time to pretend that she was already fully trained. ‘Kemara keeps to hers
elf.’
‘Did you always know you’d be a sorcerer? Is it because of your parents?’
‘It sounds weird, but it doesn’t run in families. My father says it’s a personality trait, not a blood thing: you’ve got to be crazy enough to believe you can change the world, but disciplined enough to control it.’
‘What happens if you can’t master it?’
‘The power dies.’ She thought about Kemara. ‘Or it kills you.’
Banno gave a low whistle. ‘Then I hope you master it.’
‘I will.’ It had never crossed her mind, even for an instant, that she wouldn’t.
They rode on in silence for a time, then Banno asked, ‘Where did you live before Teshveld?’
She didn’t really like talking about her past, but Banno had a nice, earnest face and tousled hair she longed to tame. ‘All over Pelaria – but mostly I wasn’t allowed to leave the house, and if I did it was as a boy. Father always pretended to be a healer or a builder or a trader and somehow we’d scrape by – until someone got suspicious and we had to move again.’
‘Must’ve been hard to make friends.’
‘Friends?’ she echoed, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘I never got to make any.’
Ignoring the sudden change in her mood, Banno laughed. ‘Hey, me neither. We’ve been travelling since before I was born too, hiring on to whoever pays us. The locals usually hate us, so we mostly keep to ourselves.’
‘It was like that when we rode with Colfar in the Otravian rebellion,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t get it, you know? These towns we were supposed to be “liberating”? They didn’t mind if we died for them, but half the time they just refused outright to let us in. What was that about?’
‘It’s amazing we’ve not met before, when we’re so alike,’ he mused aloud, and only then did she realise that she was grinning at him like a brainless hollyhock – exactly the sort of girl she despised, who only thought about boys and pretty dresses.
‘Have you ever killed someone?’ she blurted, her tongue flapping out the first thing that popped into her brain, and she immediately cringed at the blunt, thoughtless question.
‘Just once. We were guarding a wagon-train and bandits hit us. I was beside one of the drivers and he took an arrow in the gut. One of the bandits tried to leap aboard, but I cut his hand and he went under the wheels. Mind, he nearly tipped me off too, and the wagon damn nearly went into the ditch, but I righted it in time. Deo, I was scared.’
Somehow, that admission was more endearing than any claims of heroism. ‘Sorry for asking.’
‘It was a fair question,’ Banno told her. ‘I’ve never wanted this life. Whenever I see builders, I always think, “That’s what I want to be.” One day, maybe.’
‘I always thought being a soldier was quite glamorous,’ Zarelda admitted.
‘Hardly! We just stand around looking tough. Smart mercenaries don’t fight: we just take contracts and pray we don’t have to. Pa’s real good at picking sides and getting us out fast if it turns to shit.’
‘Father’s good at that too. I guess they’re not so different. But my father is a praxis-mage and he’s not a good enemy. I really hope your father remembers that.’
‘I hope so too.’ He went red, then gestured towards the horizon, where the patrol they were relieving was just coming into sight. By now the coast was closing in on one side and the mountains on the other. The peak they were calling Mount Spearhead was growing huge as they approached.
They reached its skirts by sunset, pulling up their horses on a ridge overlooking the bay. On the near side a gentle slope dropped to a desolate stone beach, but the mountain ranges blocked the way forward. This had to be the bay her father had talked about, the frozen bay they had to cross to reach Verdessa, which lay dark and green on the far side, just a mile or two away.
There was only one problem. The bay wasn’t frozen any more.
*
‘Damn it,’ Raythe muttered, staring down from the ridge overlooking the bay while wind laced with tangy sea-spray buffeted him and his leaders. The sea, a mess of whitecaps and dirty grey-brown waves, hammered into the rocky shore in giant surges that shook the ground.
He looked again at Lyam Perhan’s journal as if the words written there – the bay looks to be permanently frozen, year-round – would somehow magic the seawater back to ice.
The cartomancer had clearly miscalculated.
To his right was a river which poured out of a ravine on the near side of Mount Lucallus, which was the southernmost tip of a spur of mountains; they had no chance of crossing it, not with wagons and livestock. His caravan was stranded with no way forward.
Just half a mile across the bay, Verdessa sat mocking them, its lush loamy greens in stark contrast to the lifeless, scoured brown tundra on which they stood. Over there, rich hunting in fertile forests probably meant they could eat like lords. Here, they’d starve.
Mount Lucallus, he thought bitterly. He’d laughed when he’d heard that kragging Luc Mandaryke had a mountain named after him, but right now, it felt like his old nemesis was up there, looking down on him and mocking his failure.
Basically, we’re well and truly kragged.
Behind him, Sir Elgus Rhamp stood rocking in the wind and staring blankly across the bay. Mater Varahana was gazing skywards, her lips moving, praying for enlightenment, perhaps. Kemara Solus had her hands on her hips, her face closed up. Even Jesco looked a little helpless, faced with an obstacle he could neither charm nor stab.
Behind them were the men and women and children who’d followed them from Teshveld: they were all looking for a solution from their leaders.
‘Well, Lord Vyre?’ Kemara called. ‘How’re you planning to get us out of this one?’
I have no idea . . . ‘I imagine it’ll freeze over in a few months,’ he muttered.
‘We’ve got about a month’s supply of food,’ she snapped.
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘What, like “you’ve screwed up”?’
He ignored her and went back to trying to work out some way to get across, but even a sorcerer who’d mastered the winds couldn’t fly, and there was nothing in the shape of Mount Lucallus that suggested another hidden Aldar fortress – and anyway, it was on the far side of the torrential river gorge. ‘Perhaps we can build rafts and float across?’ he wondered out loud.
‘Really?’ Kemara snorted. ‘I assume it’s escaped your notice, but the wagons are made from short planks – nothing we could build would hold more than a few people or horses at a time. And the seas are wild enough to rip apart whatever we build, anyway.’
‘There’ll be calm days,’ Raythe replied hopefully, his thoughts beginning to move again. He pointed to the thickly forested far shore. ‘We could send a team across to cut longer timber.’
Elgus Rhamp was nodding slowly. ‘Maybe.’
‘No, rafts won’t work,’ Varahana said. ‘There’s no way to steer or propel them, and each return trip would take most of a day – even without mishap we’d be here for a month at least.’
‘Then we need a faster solution,’ he conceded, looking at Kemara. ‘That means the praxis.’
‘What, you can just magic up a bridge or something?’ she asked, her voice a mix of sarcasm and curiosity.
So she is just a little interested in what she might be able to do.
‘Well, I could get the spirits to build a causeway from rock and earth, but they wouldn’t be able to do it any faster than a gang of men. And any wooden bridge – even assuming we could cut the timber to shape – would only take us onto the near flank of that mountain, which is so steep only the most agile could climb it. We’ll see if there’s a gentler crossing inland, but we’re running out of supplies, and therefore, time.’
‘So you’re saying you’re really no use at all?’
What happened to her, that she’s so scared of her own powers? he wondered. ‘No, only that we need a smarter solution. There’ll
be a way, I’m sure of it.’
The watching crowd fell silent, and then got bored – there was nothing interesting in just watching a man think – and started drifting away, followed by his leaders.
Finally just he and Varahana were left. ‘Any ideas?’ he asked her.
‘Can you call down the planetary rings to make a bridge?’
They shared a smile, gazing up at the dim light of the rings half-hidden behind the scudding clouds. ‘If only.’
Then inspiration did hit. ‘I’d need timber and a sextant – and I’d need to work out the equations,’ he muttered. ‘And it’ll burn up the last of the istariol I’ve hoarded. But the direction is right, and I can cope with the distance, I think.’
Varahana had no idea what he was on about.
Another look at the alignment of the planetary rings and he was sure it could work. With rising satisfaction, he called Jesco and Vidar over. ‘I’ve got a solution,’ he told them. ‘You need to find the best young carpenters we have and we’ll have to get a team across the inlet.’
‘What do you intend?’ Varahana asked.
‘There’s a way of using the praxis to open a gate between two places, but it’s tricky, and when it’s activated, it creates a kind of sensory explosion that any other sorcerer for at least a hundred miles in every direction will feel: it’ll be like sending up a gigantic torch saying “Here we are!”. There’s bound to be praxis-wielders at the imperial garrison in Verdessa: they’ll sense our activity and they’ll want to investigate.’
‘Is there no other way?’ Vidar asked.
‘Not that I can think of, not in the time we have – or rather, don’t have.’
‘Provisions are getting dangerously low,’ Jesco agreed.
‘But there’ll be game in those woods over there,’ Raythe pointed out, ‘so if we can find a way round the cliffs, we can send our hunters ahead while I work on the gate.’ He clapped Vidar’s shoulder. ‘I’ll have to send Zarelda across, so make sure whoever goes with her can be trusted.’
‘Raythe, relax,’ Varahana said. ‘She’s way more mature than you credit.’
‘Aye,’ he agreed, ‘that’s what worries me.’
