by Spurrier, Jo
Dedication
For Simon
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books by Jo Spurrier
Copyright
Map
Chapter 1
The axe was dull, the blade nicked and chipped. Every blow of it sent a shock rippling through Sierra’s arms, and her wrists ached from the impact. It hadn’t been sharpened in months — not since before the Slavers captured it with its owner from some village or other. The Akharians didn’t trust their slaves with honed weapons, not even the women assigned to cut wood for the camp. The chilblains on her fingers throbbed, and her lungs were full of the reek of this hellish place, a stench of rotten eggs that made her cough and her throat burn when the wind blew from the north. All around, the sound of axes drifted through the trees.
Instead of the ice-crusted wood under her blade, she pictured the faces of the men who stalked the meat-market each night, or the slave-masters who kept their captives in line with club and fist. She pictured Kell’s face under the falling axe, and smiled to herself.
As she raised it again she realised that the other slave on this patch of timber had fallen still, the dull thud of her axe ceased, just as a boot crunched on snow behind her. A hand caught the handle as she bunched herself to swing.
‘I know what you are.’
Sierra turned to find the woman watching her with narrowed eyes. She was older by some years, with streaks of steel in her hair and deep lines weathered into her face. The aching of her hands and her back fed Sierra a slow but steady trickle of power that coiled around her spine in a thread of prickling warmth, but to Sierra it seemed that even the power was tainted by the reeking miasma of this place.
‘You think you’ve kept yourself hidden, but I’m onto you. And I’m not the only one.’
Sierra wrenched her axe away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ There were no guards nearby, but with the work-team so spread out, the soldiers were on a constant patrol to make sure the slaves didn’t slack. There was little chance they’d run away in the sacred valley of Earthblood — anyone who strayed from the marked path risked stumbling into a scalding pool, or breaking through a fragile crust of earth into a pit of boiling mud.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ the woman demanded. ‘I met you once before, girl, at Loramic’s Hollow, when the lord magister came seeking his new apprentice.’
The words made her chest tighten and her heart thump within. Two years ago her world had been torn apart in the ruins of a temple near Loramic’s Hollow, where Lord Kell finally ran her to ground. Her family had sacrificed all they had to keep her hidden, but what chance did simple herder folk have against a Blood-Mage?
‘Why are you here, Demon? Did your master send you to feed from our pain and suffering?’ the woman hissed.
Sierra dropped her axe, heedless of where it fell, and seized the woman’s coat with both hands. ‘Did any of them survive?’
‘What? Who?’ The woman recoiled and tried to shove the girl away.
The surge of emotion brought Sierra’s power roaring up, raking vicious claws at the underside of her skin, but she clenched her teeth and forced it back. ‘My family! Did any of them make it out?’
The woman was shocked, gaping and speechless for so long Sierra had to fight down the urge to slap her.
‘I … I don’t know. Once the soldiers were gone some of the men went to see what was left, but beasts had picked the bodies over. If anyone lived they were long gone. They built a pyre for the remains they found …’
Sierra turned away, stumbling over her fallen axe as she covered her face with her hands and willed herself not to weep. There was little chance they’d survived — she’d known they were likely all dead the moment she roused from a drugged stupor, bound and chained and with Rasten watching over her. There’s no time now to nurse old wounds, she told herself, drawing a ragged breath.
The woman was watching her with a mix of bewilderment and anger. ‘What are you doing here? Did your master send you?’
‘He’s not my master!’ Sierra snapped. There came a tickle inside her head as Rasten reached into her to drain away some of the frantic, pulsing power. He was never far from her mind these days. Little Crow, you’re making too much noise, he said. You need to shut her down.
‘Escaped Kell and fell into the Slavers’ hands?’ The woman barked a laugh. ‘You fled a fox only to fall into a snare? You don’t fool me, girl. You can destroy these murdering bastards any time you like, but you’d rather stand by and do nothing as we’re beaten and raped and worked half to death. I know what you are, girl, and before you think of silencing me, I’m not the only one. Give me one cursed good reason why I shouldn’t tell the guards there’s a mage hiding among their slaves.’
Sirri, she means every word of it, Rasten said. You’d best kill her now, before she betrays you.
Hold your wretched tongue, she snapped. ‘I swear by the Twin Suns, I’m here to help you. War-Leader Dremman of the Wolf is bringing an army from the south, but they can’t match the Akharian mages. We have to wait until the time is right, but we will free you all, I promise!’
The woman leant in close. Her clothes were rank, her hair matted and filthy and her breath foul, but Sierra knew she was no better. ‘Why should I believe you? I’ve been watching you, girl. You’ve never had to play the whore for a pack of soldiers, or sucked a cock before you’re allowed to eat. Until I see you suffer like the rest of us have, I’ll not believe a word you say.’
Before she could reply, Sierra heard hoofbeats through the trees, drawing steadily closer. The patrol had come. Normally the men patrolled the work-teams in pairs, but lately they’d taken to shirking their duty, relying on the valley’s dangerous landscape to keep their charges close as they lounged around a bonfire with a few of the women instead and taking the patrols on shifts.
Sierra shoved the woman away and snatched up her axe, but it was too late — the soldier had spotted them and he spurred his horse towards them with a snarl.
If you’d shut her down when I said, you could have avoided this, Rasten said. You always have to do things the hard way, Little Crow.
Sierra gritted her teeth. In her weeks in the camp so far she’d avoided falling prey to the meat-market, thanks to a good helping of luck and a few tricks Rasten had taught her, ways of avoiding notice, or making herself appear ugly and diseased if that first defence failed. But from the way the guard glanced dismissively at the older slave and then focussed on her, Sierra’s belly lurched with the sudden sickening feeling that her luck was about to run out.
The guard reined in sharply with a scatter of snow and swung down from the saddle with his club already in his hand. He rounded on the older woman first and with one vicious swing drove her to the ground, raining more blows on her back and shoulders while the woman shrieked, covering her head with her arms.
Sierra clenched her fists and felt power flood down into her palms like liquid fire.
No, Rasten said, and with
one brutal wrench he snatched the power away, leaving her gasping and trembling.
I can stop him!
Not without giving yourself away. In any case, she brought it on herself.
Her power flooded back as swiftly as he drew it away. Every blow of the club sent a searing lash of fire across her shoulders, an echo of pain that swiftly melted away into sumptuous warmth. He was telling the truth. She could stop him with a touch, but then what? If she gave herself away, all would be lost — her refuge from Kell, her only chance of finding Vasant’s lost texts and mastering her powers, and Isidro and Mira, who were slaves like her, would have no hope of breaking free.
The guard straightened, breathing hard, and turned to Sierra, leaving the other woman sobbing and bleeding on the snow. He reached for her arm, and when she tried to pull away he smacked her across the face with the hand that held the club. As she reeled from the blow he caught the collar of her coat and dragged her to a hollow in the lee of a few fallen trees, sheltered from the wind and full of deep, soft snow.
Sierra swallowed hard against her rising power and the pounding of her heart against her ribs. Staying with the Wolf Clan’s army wouldn’t have saved her — War-Leader Dremman would have found a way to sell her back to Kell, and then it would be Rasten shoving her down instead of some nameless foreign soldier. Others have survived it, she told herself, so can I. Still clamping down on the power that snarled and fought within her, Sierra stumbled and floundered in the formless snow. By the time she managed to turn and face the soldier standing over her, he’d tucked the club back into his belt and opened his coat, and was fumbling with the front of his trousers.
Rasten still watched through her eyes. He was quiet now, but his anger blazed through the connection, glowing like a forge. Rasten wanted her for himself; he always had. He wasn’t furious for her sake, just enraged that another dared take what he thought belonged to him. But he kept his rage firmly leashed, just as Sierra wrestled down her power. He’d been in her place himself, countless times. He knew when to submit and bow to the inevitable.
As the soldier loosened his belt, Sierra heard an odd sound, like crackling flames in dry grass, and a strange sensation skittered along her nerves. It felt like insects crawling under her skin, and made her shudder and try to claw at the flesh under the thick leather and fur of her winter coat.
The guard heard it, too — he lifted his head with a frown as the crackle swiftly grew to a coughing, spluttering roar: an awful, grinding noise that made her stomach squirm within her.
A glob of something bright and glowing streaked over her head and hit the guard in the chest. It was a gobbet of molten light, glowing a vivid red-orange as it struck him with a sudden reek of scorched fur. The bolt melted into his chest, scorching a charred and ragged pit through hide and flesh and bone. The guard gave one strangled cry and collapsed to the snow, leaving Sierra gaping at the flames that licked across the front of his coat.
Well, Rasten said, that was unexpected.
Isidro craned his head back to watch the glowing swathes of power crawl across the cliff face. Earthblood Temple was perched high above the valley, overlooking the clouds of ash and steam and the thick fogs that lapped at the foot of the cliff. The Akharians had begun their attack at first light, and the mages tore into the edifice like a bear ripping open a beehive, sending up great clouds of dust and powdered rock as they carved it away in chunks. Above it all rose a vast plume of ash, belched out by a volcano somewhere under the eternal ice at the roof of the world to stain the sky black. Isidro had hoped to glimpse the slopes of Demon’s Spire from here, but the peak of the volcano that formed the eastern boundary of the valley of Earthblood was lost in the haze.
‘Don’t the priests of Earthblood spend all their lives watching for omens?’ his mistress said. ‘I expect even the greenest novice could make sense of this one.’
He glanced her way and found Delphine watching him with her hood thrown back and her dark, curly hair spread out across the fur. There was concern on her face, as though she expected him to be upset at the sight of one of his people’s holiest temples being torn apart, but Isidro couldn’t help but feel a grim kind of satisfaction at the sight.
‘Aleksar, by the Good Goddess herself, you seem positively happy to see that place come down.’
It rankled that he’d grown so used to the slave-name she’d given him. ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘as far as I’m concerned, your people are welcome to it. The temple servants will fare no worse in your slave camps than they do up there, and the rest of them can go for tiger-bait for all I care.’
Delphine tipped her head back to frown at him. ‘Mirasada said the temple servants were all criminals — murderers and the like.’
‘A few might have been sent to Earthblood for punishment,’ Isidro said. ‘But most are here as a kind of trial by ordeal, to let the Gods decide their fate.’
‘The Gods, or the priests?’ Delphine asked. They had paused on a rise to view the progress of the attack. To the west the skin of the earth had cracked open, and the molten rock oozing up from the Fires Below stained the fog red with an unearthly glow. When the wind blew in the right direction they could hear it: a sound like a wagonload of glass and pottery being crushed by an endless mill.
‘It’s not just criminals who serve the temple, madame,’ Isidro said. ‘Those accused of mage-craft are sent here, too, if the warding-stones fail to tame their power.’
‘Or if someone refuses to wear them?’ Delphine suggested, raising one eyebrow. ‘I can see it would be easy to dispose of inconvenient people in a place like this.’ Then, with a toss of her head she turned her back on the temple. ‘When you’ve had your fill of gloating, Aleksar, we have work to do.’
The temple complex clinging to the rocky cliff face had been built with mage-craft. Even after the Great Purge that had destroyed and demonised Ricalan’s mages, the priests could not deny it had taken more than the toil of hands and backs to create such a wonder, heated by hot springs and built of stone that did not crack and splinter under the assault of winter.
The temple was a wonder of artifice, but the path leading up to it was a different matter. A crumbling switchback road that clung to the icy rock, it was treacherous and unstable. Far from a defensive structure, the overhangs on the cliff sheltered anyone on the road from attacks from above. Delphine and Isidro had reasoned their way through the problem the night before — the ancient mages who had built the temple would surely not have been satisfied with such a crude approach. There should be another way in, Delphine proposed, a defensible entrance protected from the fierce northern weather, but in the last century since the war of the mages, the priests must have abandoned and concealed it.
She had presented her theory to General Boreas, who granted Delphine and her slave permission to search for this entrance, and a pair of guards as an escort.
As Isidro started down to where the guards and the horses waited, he felt it again — a prickling tremor of sensation that crawled along his nerves, and a faint whiff of something foul carried on the breeze. He stopped in his tracks. ‘Madame, do you smell that?’ It smelled like rotten meat, but that made no sense. The seasons were turning, but the far north was still locked in the deepest winter — it would be months before any dead beast thawed enough to rot.
She turned to him with a frown. ‘Smell what?’ She lifted her face and drew a deep breath, then shrugged and shook her head. Isidro turned to the horses — they should have reacted to the scent as rotten meat would draw predators and any beast of prey would sense the danger, but the mounts stood with heads down and ears turned back, calm and unperturbed.
‘What’s the matter, Aleksar?’ Delphine said.
It had been bothering him ever since they’d begun their search: a nagging sense of unease, the feeling that something just wasn’t right. He glanced back towards the temple. ‘There’s … something strange here, madame.’ He’d always had a touch of power, just enough to register when the priests te
sted him for the taint of mage-craft, as they tested all children. It had never been anything more than an annoyance … until he’d been captured and tortured by Kell and subjected to the rituals of Blood Magic. Since then, his sense of mage-craft had grown sharper, turning into something he barely recognised. ‘I thought it was just the mages at the temple …’
Delphine put her hands on her hips, but her expression was one of exasperated amusement, not annoyance. ‘Aleksar, tell me, what exactly is it we’re searching for? Don’t you think the mages who built a hidden pathway could have left some enchantments in place? That’s what you’re sensing, I’m sure of it.’
He pressed his lips together, and shook his head. ‘I don’t know, madame. Something here seems … rotten.’
She raised one eyebrow. ‘Or decayed, perhaps? Like an enchantment that has been running untended for a century?’
He frowned and didn’t answer. Beneath the splints and wrappings, his ruined right arm was beginning to throb, and he gingerly laid his hand over the bulge it made beneath his coat.
Delphine scowled at him, her amusement fading. ‘Are you unwell? We can go back, but if we miss this opportunity, Aleksar, the Battle-Mages will sweep in and take it from us.’
That spurred him to act. He dreaded the Battle-Mages almost as much as he did Kell. ‘Oh, by all the Gods, no. We’ll find it, madame, but … all my instincts are telling me to be cautious. There’s something strange out here.’
Delphine sighed. ‘Aleksar, there’s truly nothing here that could be any threat to us — the only living souls in this valley besides our men are the priests and those poor wretches trapped in the temple. But very well, we’ll be careful. Now, these currents you’re sensing — where are they coming from?’
He closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the wisps of power seeping through the air around them, and gestured to a swathe of forest and scrub that lay to the southeast. It was half-hidden within a bank of mist, but he could hear the rhythmic thock of axes coming from within it, the sound oddly deadened by the frozen moisture in the air. There was a work-team out there, gathering fuel for the camp.
