by Spurrier, Jo
‘I’ve heard of it,’ Cam said as he stuffed the hobbles into the saddlebags. ‘Mount up. We should get well away from here before dawn.’
‘But Cam, what are we going to do?’ Delphine asked as she scrambled into the saddle. ‘They’re not going to stop searching for us — can we really stay out of their net?’
He and Isidro could have done it, perhaps, if luck was on their side and Isidro still had two good hands, but Delphine had little experience living rough and even less at staying hidden. ‘It won’t be easy,’ he said, ‘but what choice do we have?’ In the past few weeks he’d run out of allies altogether. First Sierra had gone, then Isidro and now Mira.
Delphine seemed to be following the same trail of thought. ‘So here we are on our own, while Isidro’s holding out against Kell and Sierra’s going after him with Rasten … I just wish we knew where they were all going.’
Cam remembered then what he’d overheard from the Akharians. ‘West,’ he said. ‘Kell’s heading west, and Rasten and Sierra are going after him.’ He briefly told her of the muttered conversation that had been carried out above his vantage-point.
‘Well,’ Delphine said, ‘maybe we should follow them.’
‘Into Akhara? Where they want to execute me and do the Gods only know what to you?’
‘They’d have to find us first. We both stand out here, what with my skin and your hair, but no one would look twice at us in the empire, Akharians aren’t all dark-skinned like me, you know. No one would suspect we’ve gone there, and they can hunt through these hills to their heart’s content. If I can get to a bank I have a little money put aside … and Isidro and the others might well need our help, if they survive the battle with Kell.’
When Cam twisted around in the saddle to face her it seemed she could read the doubt in his eyes. ‘Well, would you rather spend the next few months skulking around these wretched hills?’ she asked. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to actually do something to help our friends, rather than sit back and let them fend for themselves?’
She did have a point. ‘You realise it’ll mean weeks of travelling like this,’ he said. ‘Riding at night, staying out of sight, probably running for our lives as often as not.’
‘Well, won’t we have to do that anyway?’
‘Can you make more of those blasting-stones?’
‘Oh, easily. Look, Cam, I just can’t bear to stay here and do nothing. I simply can’t.’
Cam scowled down at the ground, and then glared at the trees blocking his view of the sky. ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said. ‘Right now we need to ride.’
Chapter 19
Isidro kept his gaze on the seething flames, trying to ignore the ragged moans of pain from the other side of the camp. Kell had found another fleeing soldier, and Isidro knew he would spend half the night amusing himself with this new toy.
He turned over his left wrist to examine the stone pressed against his skin. Kell had bound the enchantment with wire, and even if his ruined right hand had had the dexterity to manipulate the metal, he couldn’t pry the knots loose — Kell had fused them with a touch of power. Now, a week later, the burns were healing, but it would take a pair of blacksmith’s shears to release the cuff. Any attempt to use power on the stone or the wires sent a lance of agony through his arm, feeding Kell a fresh flux of power into the bargain.
Isidro had spent all of the first day planning his escape. The horse fell lame again within a day, but Kell had stumbled across a handful of fleeing soldiers and slaughtered them, keeping their horses and one of the men. The old man would have to sleep sometime and as the first screams rang out in the evening air, Isidro was already planning where to go when he took the remaining horses and fled.
Of course, Kell had guessed his plans. He used the power raised by the ritual to create the enchantment and its partner, which he carried himself. It permitted Isidro to be only a short distance away from Kell before the enchantment woke and sent a searing pain through his nerves — the first touch of it was enough to bring him retching to his knees. The range varied according to Kell’s whim. He could, if he wished, make it unbearable for Isidro to be anywhere but right at Kell’s side, and he’d used it more than once to swiftly raise power. With the stone and wires in place, Isidro had been forced to put any thoughts of flight aside.
The strangled moans from Kell’s latest victim had stopped, but the Blood-Mage wasn’t cursing and raving, so it was likely the man had just fainted. If he had lost another victim to apoplexy before the ritual was complete, Isidro would have heard the explosion of rage by now. He stirred the fire in the trench again and thought about checking on the horses, but swiftly pushed that idea aside as well.
The torture of Kell’s first victims had left Isidro shaken, and to find comfort he made pets of the horses, as though tending them could somehow make up for his helplessness in the face of that horror. When they had crossed paths with a party of Akharian soldiers a few days later, Kell took fresh mounts and turned his knives on the beasts Isidro had taken such care of. He attacked the soft parts, the eyes, lips and ears and hacked through the flesh and bone of the tail, injuries that would not kill, but leave the beasts helpless to feed or drive off the biting flies drawn by oozing blood. Since Kell could not raise power from animals, Isidro knew it was done solely for his sake, because he’d made the error of letting Kell see him take refuge in the work. After that, Isidro made certain not to give the old man anything that could be used against him.
Once the fire had burned down, Isidro spread the coals out and shovelled earth into the pit, tramping it well so no air could reach the cinders. Then he wrapped himself in his blankets and lay down on the warm earth, pulled the ground-sheet over his head in case of rain, and tried to sleep.
When he woke the next morning as dawn flooded the sky, Kell was out of sight inside his tent, and the camp was still.
Isidro stretched carefully beneath his blanket, reluctant to leave his still-warm bed. There was no force on this earth that could have compelled him to go into a tent with Kell, and so he always slept under the open sky, even when the weather was bad. It was better not to make the old man rouse him, so at last Isidro rolled out from under the blankets and began to build up the fire. As he put a pot of water on to heat, he heard a low moan behind him and felt his stomach clench into a knot.
Kell’s victim was still staked out on the ground. He never bothered to clear the carrion away, but this was the first time Isidro had seen him leave a sacrifice alive. The morning was still too cold for flies, but once the air warmed they would scent the blood and come to feed. When the man moaned again Isidro began to turn towards him, hesitated, and then forced himself to look. He tried to avoid letting Kell’s entertainments fix themselves in his memory, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on the suffering soul.
A discarded knife lay beside the ruin of flesh, its blade black and crusted with old blood. Gulping down his rising gorge, Isidro allowed himself to take in the sight piece by piece. There was no chance the man could recover from what Kell had done, but if he had survived this long then shock and blood-loss were unlikely to finish him off soon. It could take days of exposure to wear him down, unless scavengers found him first.
Isidro’s eyes kept tracking back to the knife. He’d performed his share of mercy-killings on a battlefield. One swift stroke was all it would take, otherwise Kell would ride away and leave the poor wretch blind, helpless and in agony, praying for release.
Isidro glanced towards the tent. Of course, Kell would be furious, but was Isidro truly so afraid of that anger? He had a code of honour that he had clung to despite all that had been taken from him. Betraying it now would be an act of surrender he was not prepared to make.
With a silent curse, Isidro circled around the spread-eagled body and snatched up the knife. Power was thick around him, tainting the very air he breathed, choking and cloying in his throat like foul smoke.
Isidro crouched beside the body, trying to a
void taking in the details of flayed muscle, yellow bone and the silvery coils of intestines. His hand trembled as he gripped the hilt — it still didn’t feel as strong or as sure as his right hand once had, and he said a silent prayer to the Black Sun to steady his aim. ‘May you find peace in the next world, you poor bastard,’ Isidro murmured in Akharian, and he sank the knife between the ribs, aiming for the heart.
The world around him convulsed — there was no other way to describe it. The cloud of raw power coalesced into interwoven lines of force, a net that covered him and the twitching, gasping corpse quivering beneath the knife. Too late, Isidro saw the trap. Even if he’d known how to escape Kell’s noose, it was too late — he sensed power stirring through the sigils and, as the victim shuddered and died, it hit him like a torrent. Power flooded through the blade, bit into his palm and then surged through to fill the channels he’d constructed under Delphine’s tutelage. The force of it hurled him back against the soft, moist earth as his muscles cramped and spasmed.
Isidro rolled to his knees and retched into the grass, as though the tainted power was a poison his body sought to expel. Over the blood thundering in his ears and the hum of power in his head, he heard the rustle of the tent-flap as Kell emerged and crossed the clearing to stand over him. ‘Boy, you are as predictable as the tides,’ Kell said. ‘And yet you’re lucky, too. Do you have any idea how long an apprentice ordinarily has to serve before they earn the right to be initiated? It took that whore Rasten four years, although I must say he took it in a more manly fashion than this. You’re marked as a Blood-Mage now. Keep that in mind, should you still be entertaining the thought of escaping your master. Now, I think it’s time for breakfast. I want steak, rare and juicy. See to it.’
The Akharian soldier gazed steadily at the ground as he knelt with his hands tied behind his back, trembling and pale with fear.
After seeing the remains of the soldiers Kell caught, Sierra thought, he was probably just relieved that he’d only been bound hand and foot, not stripped and staked out like a fresh hide.
She crouched on her heels in front of the soldier, and watched him shift his gaze to her feet.
‘Why are your comrades following us?’ she demanded in Akharian.
The soldier didn’t move, didn’t so much as clear his throat.
Sierra grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head up so he was forced to meet her eyes. ‘You know we can make you speak.’
The glance he gave her was utterly impassive, then he lowered his eyelids again.
With a hiss of annoyance Sierra raised her right hand and let her power flow.
Rasten unfolded his arms and caught her wrist, with a creak of his leather coat, ‘Leave him to me. You’re a novice at this craft, Little Crow, and we don’t have the time to let you hone your skills.’
Sierra wrenched her hand free and stood. When Rasten turned his dead eyes to their prisoner and drew his knife, she took a step back, and then as he kicked the prisoner onto his back and planted a knee on the man’s chest, she stalked away, heading back to their tent and the campfire.
They were camped on the barren valley floor west of the Greenstone River, on lands the Akharians had swept across at the start of winter. The ruins of the king’s fort and the volcano that had engulfed it had dropped out of sight below the eastern horizon.
The bare land made Sierra’s skin prickle with unease. She did not like camping out in the open, but with the Akharians tracking their movements it made little difference whether they spent the night here or in the deepest, thickest copse. Even though this way no one could creep up on them, nothing could make her like the situation. They were out there even now, watching. She felt like a leopard on the hunt, dogged at every step by a mocking crowd of jays.
As Sierra crouched by the fire to warm her fingers, she realised her hands were shaking. She hadn’t heard any cry from their prisoner, and glanced over to see that Rasten still held him down, but had the knife in a neutral position, its blade unbloodied. The prisoner was talking, though, and with a muttered curse Sierra turned away and clenched her hands into fists to quiet the tremors.
Could she really have tortured the man? For no purpose other than to gain information? The knowledge was hardly vital — it was clear from the way the Akharians were scattered that they did not intend to interfere. It was only when their scrutiny grew maddening that she and Rasten had run one to ground. After the first few patrols attacked unaware of what they faced, the rest scrambled to stay out of their way.
Sierra loosed her controls and let her power flow, bursting from her hands in a glowing nimbus of light. She could have shocked him without feeling a strain upon her conscience — she still did such things by accident all the time, even with the improvement Rasten’s training had wrought. How was that any different from wielding a knife? For that matter, how was it any different from stepping aside and leaving Rasten to handle the blade? There were times when failure to prevent an action was a close cousin to performing it herself.
Sierra wrapped her arms around herself and bit hard on her lower lip. The truth was that she just couldn’t decide if she cared if the soldier was tortured or not. She found it difficult to look on an Akharian without remembering what it had felt like to be a woman in the slave camps, trapped, powerless and terrified she would be chosen next. Somewhere near her heart she carried a little coal of hatred for these latest foreigners to invade her land and murder, rape and enslave her people. But when the coal flared and caused her fury to rise up, so did the image of Kell, gloating down as she and Rasten knelt beside the stocks, awaiting his command. The thought of being like him, even in the smallest part, filled her with revulsion. Sierra felt as though there was a war raging inside her, and with each day that passed the battle came a little closer to tearing her apart.
The snort of a horse and the sudden thud of hooves on sodden earth startled Sierra out of her daze. She stood and looked around to see their prisoner riding away as though all the demons of the underworld were snapping at his heels. Frowning, Sierra turned to Rasten, who was cleaning his knife on a scrap of rag as he strode back to the fire.
‘You let him go?’ Sierra asked.
Rasten hesitated, giving her a wary look. ‘I … I didn’t see the point of killing him.’ If Sierra was confused, Rasten seemed even more so as he glanced after the retreating soldier.
‘You told me never to leave a live enemy behind,’ Sierra said.
‘Little Crow, at this point the whole world would be glad to see us dead. They’re only staying their hands to give us a chance to destroy Kell. When all the nations of the world are our enemies, I don’t see much point in killing one man.’ He refused to meet her eyes as he spoke. Mercy? From Rasten? It wasn’t the first time he’d shown it, she reminded herself.
‘I’m hungry,’ Sierra said. ‘I’ll start cooking, and you can tell me what the Slaver told you.’
Rasten didn’t know how to cook — he’d never had occasion to learn. Sierra didn’t mind the work; the earthy, domestic chores seemed to ground her, letting her feel briefly normal again. As she punched down the bread-dough that had been rising since the morning, then coiled logs of it around green twigs and propped them over the coals to bake, Rasten told her what he’d learnt. ‘Kell and Balorica are heading for the fens. Now that the Akharians have stopped trying to engage with him, he’s riding west as the crow flies. We’re still a good four or five days behind him.’
‘And we lost another few hours chasing that wretched Slaver,’ Sierra said through gritted teeth as she sawed at a hunk of dried sausage taken from the soldier’s saddlebags.
‘That knife’s blunt,’ Rasten said. ‘Give it to me, I’ll sharpen it.’
‘I can manage,’ Sierra snapped.
‘You’ll cut yourself, hacking away like that. Give it here.’ When Sierra ignored him, Rasten came around the fire and seized her wrist, digging his fingers in to force her to let go. ‘Use this,’ he said, handing her one of his own kniv
es as he retreated to examine the blade. ‘This is pathetic, Sirri. Don’t you know how to sharpen it?’
‘Of course I know. I don’t have a whetstone.’
‘I do. You should have mentioned it.’
The knife, like all the rest of their gear, had been scavenged from the leavings of the king’s army. The time it had taken to assemble the scanty equipment was part of the reason Kell had drawn so far ahead. ‘You might have told the wretched Slaver that if the Akharians want us to finish Kell for them they could help by dropping supplies for us.’
Rasten raised his eyes from the knife and sharpening-stone. ‘You know, I didn’t think of that. I’ll mention it next time.’
When she finished slicing the sausage Sierra turned the bread over the fire and sat on her heels, licking the grease from her fingertips. ‘So what are the lands like across the fens?’
‘Dry and barren,’ Rasten said. ‘Not many people live there, from what I know.’
‘So that’s Kell’s game. Lure us somewhere there aren’t enough people to feed me power.’
‘It makes sense,’ Rasten said.
‘And if we couldn’t finish him when I had a whole cursed army to feed from, what chance do we have in a desert?’
‘It was my fault we failed,’ Rasten said. ‘I wasn’t ready. I froze up.’
‘But still —’
‘We’ll find a way!’ Rasten snapped. ‘We don’t have a choice. We either kill him or we die, Sirri; there are no other options. And aren’t you forgetting about your friend Balorica?’
Sierra pressed her lips together. ‘If Kell’s games don’t drive him mad first.’
‘He deserves more credit than that,’ Rasten said. ‘He’s survived this long, after all.’
‘But Kell knows all his weaknesses,’ Sierra said. ‘Everything that bastard’s done has been designed to bring him down.’ They’d both felt the moment Isidro had been tricked into delivering the killing blow and so tainted himself forever with Blood Magic.
