by David Hair
‘What, you mean unchaperoned?’ Zar teased, while Banno looked up hopefully.
‘None of my business,’ Vidar snorted. ‘But the sooner we know what’s over there, the less time we waste. I’m sending Ando and Norrin up the glacier a way, to see if they can spot anything helpful. Meanwhile I’ll take Tasker back and find Raythe. There’s no one out here; you two will be fine so long as you’re careful.’
‘We will be,’ Banno said earnestly.
Excited by this show of trust in them, Zar and Banno clambered over the broken ice where the glacier met the lake to the flat surface beyond. From there it was an easy trot over the ice, heading for the northern side. They hit the shore without mishap and went straight from pure ice to gravel covered in old snow. The light was failing, but they could see that they’d emerged onto a plateau. Then they came upon a tree, rimed and blackened, and then many more, the edge of a forest. They weren’t pines, but some more exotic lowland species. The stark bare branches were caked in ice.
‘Every tree is dead,’ Banno panted. ‘It’s like we said.’
Unconsciously, they moved closer together as light faded and the mist crept closer. Zar called Adefar into herself, feeling her senses expand as they hurried around the increasingly swampy shore, seeking a place to camp.
‘I’ve got a strange feeling,’ she told Banno, in an involuntary whisper. ‘It’s like we’re not alone . . .’
*
‘Damn the thing,’ Kemara swore, slamming her fist against her broken cart.
Veet Brayda was dying, but she couldn’t stop trying to save him, so she’d stayed behind when the Tolleys moved on, just her and Moss Trimble and poor Veet, and Beca of course. They weren’t the last in line, though: Vidar had positioned scouts at the rear and they shouldn’t be far behind her. Even so, she was really wishing she hadn’t sent Sim Tolley on. Veet kept coughing up blood and she’d had to stop repeatedly to drain his lungs. Trimble’s back was still too painful for him to be any help, so he mostly slept.
Then the axle broke, her cart collapsed and the spokes of one wheel snapped, throwing her off and tossing around her two patients, who’d been lying side by side in the back, sending Veet into another coughing fit. Trimble’s stitches broke open yet again, but she still had to get the sailor to help her with Veet. All the while Beca, trapped in a crooked harness, brayed at them in fury.
She managed to free Beca, then lifted the cart enough for Moss to slide a box beneath to prop it up. Then they stared at the cart and wondered what to do next.
‘I can’t leave anything behind,’ she told Moss. ‘These are the caravan’s entire medical supplies.’
‘They shouldn’t have let you fall behind,’ he noted.
‘But they did,’ she grumbled, ‘and really, it’s my own fault. I’m the one who sent Tolley on his way.’
‘He should’ve stayed regardless,’ Trimble growled, in a way that gave her pause. He’d been nothing but cheerily affable so far, but right now there was something dangerous in his face. But then he shrugged and was himself again. ‘They’ll miss us, for sure. Probably think you stopped off for a romantic evening with your favourite patient.’
‘Piss off,’ she laughed, relieved to be back on familiar ground. ‘I don’t fancy Veet at all.’ She looked up at the darkening skies. For the first time in days the sky had an air of menace. ‘We can’t fix this and it’s too late in the day anyway. There’re scouts behind us. Let’s make camp, feed them when they arrive and deal with it in the morning.’
Moss gazed up at the churning clouds, nodded, and said, ‘Aye, but it’s going to be a bad night, I’m thinking.’
Kemara had to do most of the work herself, but Moss pitched in as best he could, seeing to Veet’s comfort while she hauled the gear from the cart and pushed it all against the leeward wall, then pitched the tent. She picketed Beca and fed her some grain, before hauling her small stack of firewood into a crevice where she could build a fire.
But when she came to the tapers, they were soaked – they’d fallen in the snow when the cart tipped – and with that discovery came the first whistle of the winds howling down the gorge and whipping at the tent. In seconds the pegs had been ripped out; a moment later the sheltering cover had been torn away and sent flying. She shrieked after it as despair settled in her stomach.
They’ll find our bodies in the morning, she thought with a shudder, then chided herself. ‘Come on, Moss – let’s pile everything against this wall. We’ll shelter in here.’
They lugged everything crucial up against the mouth of the narrow crevice, building a low wall of boxes packed with snow to hold together, while Beca bleated anxiously. She could see more of Trimble’s wounds had opened again, the bloody marks soaking through his shirt as he laboured beside her, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip.
‘Rest now,’ she told him. ‘I’ll light the fire, then see to your back.’
He looked at her, and then the ruined tapers. ‘Do you have others?’
‘No. I’m going to have to use the praxis . . . You all right with that?’
He tensed up, but said, ‘Do what you must.’ Then he winked. ‘It’ll be cosy.’
Oh Deo, am I going to be fighting him off tonight? Her stomach clenched, the reflex of years spent pushing people away, even though Moss seemed decent enough. But she had walls inside her he’d never have suspected.
‘Stay back,’ she warned. ‘I need to concentrate.’ Mostly, I need you to back off.
His eyes narrowed slightly, but his annoyance was momentary. ‘I’ve not seen magic up close.’
‘It’s not a sideshow,’ she snapped. ‘Keep Beca calm. I’ll be linking to a familiar spirit, then using words and signs to instruct it. It only takes a few moments and fire is easy. Just don’t distract me.’
She turned from him and spoke the forbidden words just loud enough to reach spectral ears – that meant Moss would hear them too, but he wouldn’t know that it wasn’t Old Magnian she used. ‘Kaneska alla mizra.’
Buramanaka touched her mind, a hot caress that conveyed hungry eagerness.
‘Cuzka inim kasai,’ she instructed, while tracing the Aldar rune.
The fire burst into life and the familiar danced in the flames, causing the smoke to swirl into the shape of his masked visage. Behind her, Moss sucked in his breath and she hurriedly called out, ‘Saru—’ in dismissal, and when Buramanaka resisted, ‘Ima saru!’
The flames all but went out as the spirit was sucked into the nebulum and vanished.
She spun to find Moss Trimble holding her knife.
For a moment she feared for her life, but even as she found her tongue, a voice called, ‘Kemara?’
She didn’t take her eyes off Trimble, who looked at her and then the fire. ‘I thought I saw—’ he began.
He saw the face of Buramanaka in the smoke. Damn it!
‘It was nothing,’ she assured him, pulling the knife from his unresisting hand and placing it beside her cooking implements again. ‘Someone’s here,’ she told him.
Trimble’s face closed right up as the voice outside their little niche called again. ‘KEMARA?’
‘In here,’ she shouted, recognising Raythe’s voice as the Otravian appeared at the mouth of the small crevice, holding a horse’s reins. Jesco Duretto was behind him as usual, his serenely handsome face taking in her and Moss with a knowing smile that set her teeth on edge.
Bloody men – the first thing they think of when a woman’s alone is that she’s available.
‘Lord Vyre, fancy being pleased to see you,’ she drawled. ‘Our cart broke an axle and a wheel.’
‘I saw,’ Vyre replied. He tossed Jesco his reins and the Shadran set about securing their mounts beside Beca, then dragging the broken cart to the mouth of the crevice. Raythe edged in and checked on the unconscious Veet Brayda, then asked, ‘Have you seen the scouts? Mytcha and Rabb Colston were at the rear today and I’ve not passed them yet.’
‘I’ve not seen them,’ she rep
lied, coming to her feet. Trimble struggled up beside her. He looked somewhat flustered, and no more pleased to see Vyre than she was. ‘I was the last in the line when the cart tipped.’
‘Then we have a problem.’ Vyre gestured to the outside. ‘Come and see.’
He led them out into sleet and swirling snow and around the next bend, just a dozen yards onwards. From there they could see the gorge widening into a small, steep-sided valley – and the orange flickers just visible through the swirling snow suggested at least a dozen bonfires burning at the far end.
‘Are you sure there were no wagons behind us?’ Kemara asked, while Moss just stared, his face a mask.
‘None,’ Raythe said. ‘You’re the last, and the scouts haven’t reported in. I’m afraid that those must be imperial men, and that Mytcha and Rabb Colston have been taken or killed.’
His words felt like a crushing stone placed on her chest, which was just one of the many ghastly ways that mizra-witches were made to suffer. More and more weight was added until they suffocated.
No one ever escapes the empire.
4
Ice on fire
Toran Zorne stared down at the bonfires as the storm winds battered at him and the three fugitives, wondering what to do. Fate had delivered him Raythe Vyre, after so many months of futile pursuit – but he had no weapon, and Jesco Duretto was here too.
And Kemara Solus is a mizra-witch . . .
That shock paralysed him more than anything else. Vyre was just another mission, set him by his Ramkiseri overlords and their friends, the Mandaryke family. Just another bounty.
But she’s a mizra-witch . . .
The moment he’d heard her spell-words and realised she was conjuring mizra, he’d been terrified that the demon she’d conjured would recognise what he was. He’d been moments from plunging the dagger into her back when she turned and saw the blade, and then Vyre had shouted and he realised that the Otravian had to be another of them – another witch, another servant of the Pit. Kemara’s humanity, her healing skills, her earthy humour and stubborn kindness, were as much a mask as his. This was a den of vipers, a cabal of devils, and his life hung in the balance.
Faced with that, he’d retreated back into the Trimble identity. I’ve killed other sorcerers before, he reminded himself. I’ve killed Shadran blademasters too. I’ll take them all – when the time is right. Attempting anything right now would be suicidal, and in any case, no one truly knew what a mizra-witch could do.
It’s said that one witch is more powerful than a dozen sorcerers, because their familiars have had centuries longer to accumulate power.
But his task – infiltrate and strike – hadn’t changed, and now his allies were close. Tomorrow morning might bring this all to an end. New plans formed in his mind as they returned to the crevice and huddled together beside the witch’s fire. Smoke chimneyed upwards in swirls and though the wind howled down the ravine, it only brushed their shelter.
Jesco set about repairing the cart’s axle; shortening it enough so that the wheels still rolled independently, then replacing the broken spokes. It wouldn’t be as robust as before, but they’d be able to move it come dawn. Kemara cooked, while Raythe and Zorne prepared bedrolls.
‘I can take first watch,’ Zorne offered, seeking opportunity.
‘No need,’ Jesco replied, from the mouth of the crevice. ‘You’re injured, and I’m used to sleepless nights.’
He knew better than to argue, especially when Kemara said, ‘Let me look at your back. I’m sure Lord Vyre can cook.’ She and Vyre swapped places and Zorne let Kemara pull off his bloodied shirt, wincing as more scabs broke. ‘I feel like I’m going to be repairing these damned stitches for the rest of my life,’ she remarked.
‘You’re that desperate to keep me around?’ he quipped.
‘Krag off,’ she snorted, and she got to work, pulling out the broken threads, gently massaging in a lotion to prevent new infection, then getting to work with her needles.
All the while Zorne could feel Jesco Duretto studying his bare torso, but he didn’t let the gaze of the man – an unashamed pervert – unsettle him. He’d played that role before, too: sometimes there was no other way to get close to the target.
Jesco winked, then chuckled as ‘Trimble’ flipped a finger in response.
‘So, Lord Vyre,’ Kemara said, kneeling behind him. ‘What do we do about those Bolgravs?’
Vyre glanced up. ‘I have a few ideas.’ He leaned over and whispered in her ear.
Whatever he said, Kemara looked shocked. ‘Is that even possible?’
‘With the power we can generate,’ Vyre replied, ‘anything’s possible.’
Those words confirmed all Zorne’s suspicions. They’re both mizra-witches . . . and they must be stopped.
*
The two scouts should have been dead already. Larch Hawkstone’s Borderers had been scouting ahead of the main Bolgrav forces, presumably following Vyre’s people up the glacier, although they’d seen little sign that anyone had passed this way. Persekoi told him that Vyre was concealing their tracks with sorcery, an uneasy thought.
Given that, Hawkstone’s group hadn’t pushed too hard to catch up, but by late afternoon they reached a wider section of the canyon, where they’d surprised two of Vyre’s scouts. An arrow to the back took one down and they’d surrounded the other before he could run.
Hawkstone knew them both: Mytcha and Rabb Colston, farmers from Teshveld who’d vanished with the rest of Vyre’s people. They’d pulled the arrow out of Mytcha’s back – it hadn’t hit anything critical – then handed them over to the Bolgravs, even though they were just two ordinary lads caught up in someone else’s schemes.
But Persekoi gave the Colston brothers to the Izuvei sorcerers, and that’s when things got bad.
First the sorcerers, an old man and a woman who might have been his sister, lit a bonfire, then they carved a huge hexagon into the ice and after stripping the Colstons and inking them with runes, strapped them to two wooden cross-beams set in the middle.
Most of the Bolgravian soldiers found other things to do rather than watch, and after a few minutes, so did his own men, but Hawkstone was morbidly fascinated.
Know your enemy, he told himself. Learn their ways.
The blind sorcerers took up position on either side of the scouts and began carving more symbols on the air while chanting, calling their familiars to them; that much Hawkstone could follow. He watched as they drew energy from the bonfire into themselves and reshaped it until shifting faces with leering eyes appeared in the flames – then the firelight flowed like liquid into the carved hexagon, lighting it up somehow without melting the ice.
Mytcha and Rabb tried to scream, but they’d been well-gagged: this was avalanche country, after all. They strained at their bonds while the blind sorcerers chanted, gesticulating in graceful patterns.
Then the real horror began.
The surface of the glacier within the hexagon became a sea of blue-white hands and arms that rose and crawled towards the two men, first seizing their legs, then slithering up their limbs. Their eyes bulged, their mouths worked behind the tight gags, they fought the bindings until they bled, but the ice slowly engulfed them, overwhelming thighs, hips, waists and chests, making their body temperature plummet.
Finally, only their heads were free – and still they twisted and writhed, when they should have been dead: something in the sorcery was preserving the spark of life, but it wasn’t sparing them the harm or the pain. Beneath the ice, their skin peeled, revealing muscles and tendons that strained and stretched and tore in spurts of gore.
They should have been dead. If he’d dared, Hawkstone would have killed them himself, out of mercy, but all the gold in Shamaya wouldn’t have induced him to interrupt these two horrific practitioners.
‘This is power that wins empire,’ Komandir Alexi Persekoi remarked, joining him, his voice slurred. The flask in his hand stank of very strong liquor.
‘Aye,’ Hawkstone croaked.
‘When they are done, they will know these two insides outed, yuz,’ Persekoi went on, his voice shaky despite the boastful tones. ‘No man can withstand. This is true power.’
It’s a kragging travesty, Hawkstone thought.
‘One day, all world will be empire,’ Persekoi went on. ‘One race under Deo and emperor.’
The Izuvei sorceress snarled something in a guttural voice and Mytcha and Rabb Colston fell apart like slowly shattering vases of pink and scarlet.
Hawkstone turned and vomited. Persekoi slurped from the flask, carefully not looking at the remains of the two men. Then boots approached and Hawkstone turned to see the two blind sorcerers standing before them.
‘The man Vyre is seeking istariol,’ the woman said, her voice like rustling parchment. ‘A motherlode, somewhere upstream.’
Hawkstone felt his eyes bulge, but he remained still and silent, lest this terrible pair decide that saying this in his presence was an error that would require rectifying.
Istariol. Sweet Gerda, so that’s what this is all about?
It made sense now: Gospodoi’s mission, his death at Vyre’s hut and the subsequent disappearance of half the district. Istariol, the powder worth more than gold, had lured the folk of Teshveld all the way here: a dream of the impossible. Almost, he wished he were with them.
Then he looked at the two piles of icy pink sludge that had been two decent but stupid men. Fact is, they’re doomed. Vyre doesn’t stand a chance.
‘Come to my tent,’ Persekoi told the two sorcerers. ‘Tell me all.’ Then he remembered Hawkstone. ‘You heard nothing, Kapitan. Nothing. Yuz?’
‘Aye, yuz, whatever,’ Hawkstone babbled, backing away under the blind gaze of the sorcerers. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Good. Rejoin your men. Be ready to move swift tomorrow.’
*
It was one of the happiest evenings of Zarelda’s life since she and her father fled Otravia. She and Banno made camp alone, chatting and cooking together as if already married. It felt wonderfully natural.
