Queen of the North (Book 3) (Songs of the Scorpion)

by James A. West

  Cursing, Rathe leaped overboard feet first. The river wrapped him in its frigid grip, squeezing the breath from his chest. The current tugged and pulled, spinning him, and then his head slammed against a rock. For a moment he drifted, stunned, points of light flaring before his slitted eyes. He drew an involuntary breath, allowing the river to pour into his chest.

  Rathe’s eyes flared open on bubbling darkness, cold fire filling him. With a strangling exhalation, he purged the water from his lungs. With no air to take its place, he kicked hard, fighting to reach the surface. His limbs had already gone numb with cold, and he struggled against broken wood and stealthy skeins of rope trying to bind him to a watery grave—

  Coughing and flailing, he broke the surface. The only warmth he felt was on the side of his head, a wide torrent of heat. Blood. Wreckage from the Lamprey drifted around him, more and more by the moment, as the river smashed the ship to pieces. Silent corpses slid across the remains of her deck and dropped into the churning river, the eddies dragging them down.

  “Loro!” he called, the effort bringing on a bout of coughing. Finding the spot he had last seen the fat man, Rathe plunged below the surface and swam through the black, his arms almost useless as they slashed back and forth, seeking his friend.

  He came up wheezing, his limbs stiff as boards. If he didn’t get out soon, he never would. The thought, sluggish though it was, chilled him more than the river.

  Rathe took a great gulp of air that burned going down, and prepared to dive. Before he could, something tugged feebly at his leg. He reached down, and his fingers passed through wet fur—Loro’s bearskin coat!

  He caught hold of an arm and pulled. Loro didn’t budge. After a couple more sharp tugs, Rathe felt his burden shift and begin to rise. For a moment, the cold forgotten, Rathe kicked and heaved, until Loro broke the surface.

  “Gods and demons!” Loro roared, spraying water into Rathe’s face. “Foot got hung after my last breath. Thought I was drowned!”

  “We have to reach shore,” Rathe shouted.

  “Shore? We’re in a frozen hell, brother. We’re going to die here!”

  Rathe had no strength left for speaking, and barely enough for swimming. He reached for a shape bobbing nearby, but recoiled at the spongy softness of a dead sailor. He pushed the body away and watched it drift into a channel of whitewater rushing through the rocks.

  “That way,” he gasped, and followed the dead man. Loro, looking about the darkness with bulging, half-mad eyes, struggled after Rathe.

  The current battered them over rocks and splintered wood, but Rathe hardly felt a thing. Floating behind him, Loro spewed an unrelenting string of curses that became a fearful shout when they tumbled over the edge of the crude dam. They dropped a dozen feet before splashing into the thundering waters below Ruan Breach.

  When they popped up, snow lashed the darkness, blocking sight of the riverbank. Rathe thought he heard someone coughing over the roar of falling water. He urged Loro to follow him, and began swimming across the current. A pounding in his head muddled all thoughts, and his arms and legs were reluctant to work. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Loro thrashing weakly.

  “Not going to make it, brother!”

  “Stay with me,” Rathe panted. “We’re almost there.”

  “Rathe?” Loro called desperately, only his nose and lips above the water.

  “Swim!” Rathe ordered, catching one of Loro’s arms and dragging him close. He was not about to let Loro die.

  By the time Rathe’s waterlogged boots touched the rocky riverbed, he and Loro had drifted far downstream. Stumbling and heaving against one another, he and Loro clambered to higher ground and collapsed on the snow-covered stones of the riverbank. The wind was less here, no more than a breeze, but was still bitter as it sank through Rathe’s wet clothes, stealing the last dregs of his strength, stealing his breath, stealing his will. He lay shivering on his side, sucking in the frozen stink of moss and mud.

  Loro rattled deranged laughter. “I’m numb as a whore’s privy parts after a Midwinter feast night.”

  Rathe grunted in answer, struggling to his hands and knees, then to his feet. Higher up the riverbank, he could make out a dark forest, the tree limbs bent like penitents under thick white mantles.

  A muffled shout turned his attention upstream, and he was stunned to see several figures bearing torches, perhaps a quarter mile distant. They leaped from landed boats and raced toward a smaller group of people huddled near the river’s edge—the Lamprey’s survivors, Rathe was sure. He also knew those bearing torches. Edrik and his fellows.

  “It’s those bastards who dropped the cliff on us,” Loro snarled, having gotten to his feet. The fat man fumbled for the hilt of his sword, but his hand had become a stiff and useless claw. Giving up on drawing steel, he took a faltering step in their direction. Rathe halted him with a touch.

  “There are too many to risk an open attack.”

  “They have Fira and Nesaea,” Loro retorted.

  The truth stung Rathe, but dying a fool’s death would not serve to get them free. “We’ll get them back,” he said, not sure how. And we need to make haste, he considered, fingering the blood running down the side of his face. The wound would not kill him, but he couldn’t think clearly.

  “I pray you’re right, brother.”

  As do I, Rathe didn’t say, leading Loro toward the trees.

  Chapter 20

  “Leave him be,” Jathen said sharply, holding up a staying hand.

  “We’re not here to coddle our enemies, but to kill them all, save the Scorpion,” Captain Carlus said, one of Nabar’s Kingsguard. His eyes formed a black slash below the rim of his helm, but his burnished dagger glittered with the distant torchlight of those converging on the Lamprey’s crew. Like the forty men standing in the snowy darkness around him and Jathen, under Carlus’s gold-edged crimson cloak he wore a tabard emblazoned with a charging ebon bull, its horns wreathed in white roses. Carlus seemed to believe his commander, who was an even greater arsehole than he was, had placed him in charge of this particular mission. “Now stand aside, monk, so I can put an end to this puppy’s whimpers.”

  Instead of backing away, Jathen knelt beside the subject of their disagreement. The shave-headed young man, clad in simple garb that Jathen recognized from Algar’s descriptions of the bounty hunters after Rathe, lay curled around the arrow buried in his guts. He does have the look of a Prythian, Jathen mused, remembering Algar’s description. That thought led to wondering where Algar was, and why the shadowy bastard had failed to stop these fools from destroying the Lamprey. Could Algar be dead? It seemed unlikely, but….

  Pushing that away, Jathen glanced at the dead torch smoldering in the snow nearby. Before the arrow had pierced the man, he had been fleeing Jathen and the company of Kingsguard, waving the torch in warning.

  Did anyone see it? Jathen expected someone must have, but after the fellow’s companions dropped half of Ruan Breach on the passing ship, their attention had shifted to the survivors crawling out of the river.

  Jathen drew off his glove and grasped the fletched end of the arrow protruding from the man’s belly. A gentle twist earned him a groan and the youth’s full attention. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Do you mean to kill me?”

  Jathen gave a longsuffering sigh. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have let Captain Carlus have his way with that dagger of his. My intervention on your behalf should prove that I only wish to help you.”

  “Please,” the youth said, his eyes rolling from the captain’s hulking shape to Jathen’s face, “take it out. It … it hurts.”

  “Well of course it does,” Jathen said gently, as he caressed the arrow’s fletching. “But if I’m to help, we should at least know each other. Let me begin. I’m General Jathen Martel,” he said, putting emphasis on his title for the sake of Captain Carlus. “I’m a monk of the Way of Knowing.”

  The youth stared through the falling snow at Jathen�
�s busy fingers, wincing each time they brushed against the arrow’s nock. “Len,” he said in a pained hush, a pearl of blood growing from the corner of his mouth. “I’m Len … a vizien priest of … the Munam a’Dett Order.”

  “Munam a’Dett?” Jathen said in a contemplative tone. “You speak the tongue of the ancient Iron Kings. It hasn’t been spoken for five centuries or more.”

  Len licked his lips, smearing the pearl of blood. His body had taken on a frightful quiver, and the arrow jittered under Jathen’s fingers. “It means … means—”

  “Skin of the Dragon,” Jathen finished for him. “Or, perhaps, Soul of the Dragon.” He shrugged dismissively. “In either case, a strange name for a priesthood, but who am I to judge?”

  Captain Carlus snorted disdainfully. “Who indeed?”

  With blood now drooling from his mouth, Len gazed vacantly at Jathen’s boots. More blood ran from his belly, staining the snow. Jathen guessed he had only moments to learn what he could. He gave the arrow another tweak, and Len clamped his teeth on a screech. When his eyes opened again, they seemed livelier.

  “I cannot imagine why priests of any order would don the mantle of bounty hunters,” Jathen said, “but if you wanted Rathe dead, why not kill him at Iceford?”

  “Dead? Rathe? We never wanted him dead, we…. How do you know…?” Len trailed off.

  “Dear Len, let there be no secrets between us,” Jathen cajoled. Instead of another twist, he slapped his hand over the youth’s mouth and pushed the arrow deeper into his guts, and deeper still, until it scraped against the bones of his spine. Len struggled to get away, but only managed to squirm about like an earthworm baking in the sun.

  “Gods be damned, monk,” Captain Carlus said approvingly, “you’re a cold son of a poxy whore.”

  Jathen heard him only distantly. His attention was on Len and his pain. Too much too fast would kill him quicker than he would like, but too little would delay the answers he sought. When Len ceased to squirm, Jathen sat back on his heels.

  “By the Fathers!” Len whimpered, hands curled near the shaft of the arrow, but not daring to touch it. “What do you want of me?”

  “I want to know your interest in Rathe Lahkurin, the Scorpion of Cerrikoth.”

  “I … I’ll tell you all I know,” Len said, the words clipped by his chattering teeth. “But … please … stop hurting me.”

  “Ought to crush his head,” Captain Carlus said. “It’d be a mercy.”

  “The mercy will be saving his life,” Jathen said, noting that young Len’s eyes had taken on a hopeful sheen. “But first, I’d hear all you can tell me.”

  “We never wanted him dead,” Len said again. Other than the strained way he was talking, and the blood streaming over his lips, he seemed rather excited to provide answers. “The Oracle directed our footsteps in finding him. Rathe is to help us save Targas.” He looked past Jathen, searching upstream. If he saw his far-off companions, even now herding the survivors of the Lamprey together along the riverbank, he gave no notice. “We didn’t kill him, did we? By the Fathers … please tell me we didn’t.”

  Jathen placed a firm hand on Len’s shoulder. Oracle? Targas? The first he had never heard of, other than the common term used for objects and the occasional folk who foretold future events. Targas … well, that was another word of the ancient Iron Kings, and meant Everlasting City of Light. Legends of Targas were few, but the name itself had occasionally served as the rallying cry for the folk of the Iron Marches, those who had once sought to throw off the yokes of oppressive lords after the fall of the Iron Kings. With the help of time and the greatest minds of Skalos, the name Targas had vanished from memory, along with the slow demise of all the old Houses throughout the Iron Marches. All, save the recently revived House Akarlen of Ravenhold, a deed for which Jathen had Rathe and his plaything Lady Nesaea to thank, the scheming bitch who had ruined Jathen’s face with her black alchemy. But Ravenhold was of no further concern to Jathen, for he had arranged for that fortress and its master, Lady Mylene Akarlen, to fall again.

  “I hope you got all you wanted from the boy,” Captain Carlus said, “for he’s naught but a sack of meat.”

  Jathen looked back into Len’s glazed eyes. The youth was good and truly dead. Jathen doubted most of his claims, especially all that about being a priest—vizien, if memory served, was the ancient word for keeper or caretaker, which would have made him a keeper or caretaker of dragon skin. A wholly foolish notion, and surely nothing to be proud of, even if it were true.

  Jathen stood up at the same time a pair of scouts returned to the company. “What did you find?” He bit his tongue when they ignored him and spoke to Carlus.

  “Two others from the ship came ashore not a hundred strides from us. Men, by the size of their footprints. Even with the dark, we could see where they crawled out of the river and up over the rocks. After that, they headed into the forest.”

  Jathen looked to Carlus. “I trust those under your command are not as eager as you to kill any prisoners they take?”

  “Long as they don’t kill the Scorpion—and that’s saying the river didn’t kill him—they can do whatever they want to anyone they find, by order of the king himself. Could be my men have a mind to warm themselves with those two wenches you mentioned, eh?” That garnered a few chuckles from the gathered soldiers.

  Jathen felt anger heating his scar, but he resisted touching it. “I told you and your commander that Fira and Nesaea were mine alone.” If they’re still alive, he considered, struggling to ignore a wave of dread at the memory of Ruan Breach crumbling into the river and crushing the Lamprey. If Nesaea had drowned, so be it. Dead was dead, whether by his hand, or by the hand of fate. But the idea of Fira drowning was almost too much to bear.

  “You can have the women,” Carlus allowed. “Though I cannot imagine what a monk would need with them.” This time his men erupted with boisterous laughter.

  “Quiet, fools!” Jathen snarled. While they carried no torches, in order to hide in the snowy murk, laughing like a bunch of drunken idiots was sure to alert Len’s companions.

  “Settle your mind, monk,” Carlus said, his shadowed features hard. “We’re too far downstream to hear over the river.” He turned. “As for the rest of you, shut your gobs. We’ve a Scorpion to catch, and after getting dumped in the river, he’s like to be ready to sting the stones off every one of you.”

  After the laughter died, Carlus asked, “Now what, monk?”

  Jathen surveyed the snow-covered forest. “If you please, Captain Carlus,” he said with forced pleasantness, “send word to our host that the time has come to see what our net has caught.” With all his heart, he hoped it had at least snared Fira.

  Chapter 21

  After they had reached the tree line, Rathe and Loro began trudging toward the gathering of Edrik’s company and the Lamprey’s crew. Snowy brambles growing amid the trees made for slow going, but Rathe didn’t want to lose sight of the torches. The way his vision swam in and out of focus, those wavering lights served as his only guide.

  “Are we any closer?” Loro asked, teeth chattering.

  Rathe paused to catch his breath. The blood running from the split on his scalp had slowed, but the pain of the wound snaked down his spine and coiled in his guts. His mouth filled with bile, but he fought down the urge to vomit.

  “Rathe? Are you ill, brother?”

  Rathe wanted to answer, but to even think about it set his insides to sloshing. He shook his head, making it worse.

  When Loro leaned over, his eyes widened at the sight of Rathe’s gore-streaked head. “Gods! It looks like your brains are leaking out.”

  Rathe took a shaky breath, blinked a few times, swallowed. The sickening, hammering thuds continued, but the urge to spew diminished. “I think all this moving around is warming me up.”

  “You’re either lying, or about to die.”

  “I’m fine,” Rathe said, looking over Loro’s battered features. With the shadows
and clots of half-melted snow mingling on his swollen brow and cheeks, Rathe found it hard to believe his friend had come out the victor against Liamas. “It’s you who looks risen from the grave.”

  “Be that as it may, whatever you mean to do, we should do it before we become ice statues.”

  Rathe searched through breaks in the foliage and spied the ring of torches circling those who had made it ashore. “Do you see Nesaea or Fira?”

  A frown creased Loro’s brow. “The way this snow is coming down, they all look alike. I’m sure they made it out, though, and are waiting for us to come rescue them.”

  Rathe shied from the hopefulness in his friend’s voice, but just as quickly latched onto it again when he saw a pair of Edrik’s companions struggling up the riverbank, guiding a huge man between them. “They have Liamas.”

  “If they were smart,” Loro said, sounding more confident than ever, “they’d have drowned the Prythian oaf in the river, instead of bringing him into their midst.”

  Rathe recalled how inept Edrik had been back at the Minstrel’s Cup. “They aren’t fighters, and the way they dropped the cliff on the Lamprey says they are not so very smart, either.”

  “Say what you will, but they did stop the ship.”

  “Only at the risk of killing us all. And, as Edrik made it plain that he wanted me to join him, toppling half a mountain on my head is likely the worst way to make that happen.”

  Loro nodded in agreement, his gaze still on Liamas. The Prythian giant put up no fight, but Rathe noted a watchfulness in the way his head turned one way, then the other.

  “At the first sign of resistance,” Rathe said, “Liamas will attack.” Despite the beating Loro had given him, Rathe also knew the Prythian was more than a match for any handful of the fools who stood with Edrik. For himself, Loro might take on two handfuls of the outlanders.