Still as statues down there — still for the most part — were Tormentors, and suddenly Eric understood: dead city; the reason the pit devils had been driven north; and the timing of the troop build-up. There, the reasons stood motionless or stalked around in that jagged, lurching stride, like badly controlled puppets. A mass of spent arrows littered the ground, many of which had hit their targets and bounced away, only the most powerful bows and crossbow bolts piercing the monsters’ hides. No foot soldiers remained standing to fight back. In the far distance was the unmistakeable shape of a Tormentor, only it was massive, striding between buildings, then lost from view. ‘Holy shit,’ Eric said.
‘Not safe,’ rasped the war mage, clutching at his sleeve, its foul breath like rotting meat. ‘You’re Shadow.’
In places, the odd Tormentor corpse lay in broken pieces, though each one was massively outnumbered by human bodies. Eric wondered if Anfen’s corpse was down there too, and supposed it probably was.
Behind, the arrows and rocks had all but ceased raining down in the pass. There was a bustle of activity on the ground just outside the city, where among the sizeable crowd of invaders who’d survived, battering rams were being prepared for an assault on the gate. The war mage’s bird-like feet scratched and tapped impatiently at the ground, as though trying to communicate what its voice had failed to. For the first time, Eric wondered how the locals here would react to the sight of it. He said, ‘Stay here. OK? Don’t move. I have to go speak to one of those archers, but they might think you’re an enemy. Understand? I’ll be back.’
It cocked its head, but gave no indication of having understood. Eric ran to the nearest huddling shape, some way along where the top of the wall met the iron gate. A young archer — fifteen, sixteen at most, with a chubby freckled face and drooping bottom lip — looked towards him with blank, shell-shocked eyes. The kid made no motion to use the curved wooden bow which lay on his lap, one hand limply resting on its string. Eric kneeled beside him and could smell the kid had pissed himself in fright. ‘I’m a friend,’ he said lamely. ‘My name’s Eric. Are you OK?’
The kid shrugged without a change of expression.
‘What happened here?’
‘What does it look like?’ the kid said, his voice flat.
‘I’m the wrong person to ask. Looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’m going to find a man named Anfen. Do you know of him? He works for the Mayor. Do you know where I’d find him, or the Mayor?’
The kid shrugged and pointed across where the shelf jutted from the mountainside, held up by thick pillars and running like a halo above the city. Perhaps some magic had gone into its construction, for in many parts it seemed to defy gravity. Here and there ramps ran down to the city below, but guards were posted behind barricades closing them off. Rich-looking buildings were lined along the shelf where the young archer had pointed, and people were moving there in heavy traffic. ‘Why don’t you come over there with me?’ Eric said. ‘They look safe over there.’
‘They’ll die soon,’ the kid said in that same flat voice and shrugged. ‘Everything will.’
It occurred to Eric that the kid just may have seen colleagues, mates — even his own father — slain directly below. He crouched down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Maybe, but it’s less lonely over there. And wouldn’t you like a bite to eat? I sure would.’
The sound of footsteps shuffling behind him. Oh shit. The war mage had come. The kid’s face broke out of its shocked blankness and his eyes went wide.
‘Don’t worry, he’s with me,’ said Eric. To the war mage, ‘Don’t hurt him! You don’t need to protect me from him, OK? He’s a friend.’
‘Ah, but,’ the war mage rasped, hands moving expansively, face animated, voice fast. ‘Once a man approached his mirror not thinking the glass to be liquid and in he fell. Drawn sideways he was from a high place such as this into a sea-sized pool of reflection, battered by his own fists from the other side of the unshattered glass, as per falling rocks into the churning broth …’ Its cat-yellow eyes flared wide and it began that swaying dance, side to side on its feet, arms raised high, a growl in its throat. The kid instinctively raised an arrow to the string. ‘Certain fires are not for warmth,’ the war mage rasped, a warning finger raised, its voice melding with the growl in its throat. ‘Certain flames don’t touch candle wicks but burn them down.’
‘Settle down, don’t attack him!’
‘Where spells fail are claws and teeth …’
Eric felt heat building in the war mage, saw it crouching in the pose it used during its fight with Far Gaze in the woods. A single thread of hair-thin discoloured air wound down from the sky and touched the diamond-shaped tip of its staff.
There wasn’t even time to think about it: he took the gun, held it to the war mage’s head and pulled the trigger. The Glock’s huge noise made Eric almost drop it in shock, made the young archer drop his bow and throw himself sideways, hands over ears. The war mage staggered back a pace or two, its staff clattering to the floor, and its body toppling stiffly over the edge. Just before it fell, its head revolved very slowly towards Eric, mouth slightly open, eyes wide with what was — he assumed — a look of profoundest surprise.
The body tumbled down. A dozen Tormentors, perhaps drawn by the gunshot, ran towards the city wall and took apart the war mage’s body. Eric swallowed, expecting to feel the way he had after shooting the Invia, but somehow he didn’t. It felt like he’d just put an animal down, perhaps regrettable but perfectly necessary. There was no more time to reflect, for arrows began to fly from the invaders outside the gate, glancing off the turrets, some landing close to them.
The archer stared at him, not yet recovered from his surprise. Eric put the gun in his pocket. The brief rain of arrows ceased and he chanced a look down. On the wall’s other side the invading castle army prepared the battering ram for its assault on the door. Many heads turned upwards seeking whatever had made the gun’s noise. ‘Come on,’ said Eric. ‘We have to go. I don’t think it’ll be safe here much longer.’
‘You saved me,’ the kid said with no more conviction than someone commenting on the weather. Eric couldn’t tell if he was grateful or not.
‘I guess so,’ he answered. ‘Want to do me a favour back? Help me find Anfen or the Mayor.’
The kid nodded and stood, pausing to sling the bow over his shoulder. Eric followed him and tried not to look down on either side. The first battering ram charge boomed out like a massive struck drum, but the iron door didn’t tremble. A few more archers were scattered along the high wall, and more could be heard down on lower levels. Eric was shocked that many were as young as or younger than the kid leading him around.
‘What was that spell you cast?’ the kid paused to ask him. ‘What kind of mage are you?’
‘Spell? No. It was a weapon. I’m from—’ should he tell? ‘—from Otherworld.’
The kid frowned. ‘Where’s that?’
‘A long, long way away.’ For some reason he felt a lump in his throat to say it.
‘And the spell was in your weapon?’
‘I guess you could say that.’
‘Is it the same Anfen who won Valour’s Helm?’
‘Yes.’
The kid nodded and led him on. There came a bridge which led from the city wall to the thick ledge of a cliff, and from there they came to the artificial shelf ringing the city high above. Soon, though Eric didn’t know it, he walked the same path Anfen and the others had walked little more than a day before. Many people stood and helplessly watched the situation below, faces grim or disbelieving, while official-looking groups were led the opposite way, out through the secret passages in the hillsides behind. Eric followed the young archer through the bustling crowd, when suddenly he saw a familiar face among those gazing down at the carnage. ‘Siel!’ he said. The boy, evidently feeling his task complete and debt repaid, wandered away and was gone from sight in the crowds.
She turned and looked
at him with a neutral expression, though her eyes showed she’d been crying. She was not, it seemed, half as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She walked towards him slowly. ‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘Have a nice adventure?’
‘Hardly. What’s wrong? Is Anfen dead?’
She scoffed. ‘Shall we send you to check if he’s there?’ A hand went to the curved blade on her belt and he saw she was shivering with anger. When he got over his surprise, he said, ‘Wait! Don’t do it. I can explain what happened.’
She inclined her head with a humourless smile as if to say: I very much look forward to it. ‘And where’s the old twit?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe on his way here with the wolf, Far Gaze.’
She looked with a moment’s pause at the war mage’s staff in his hand, which he didn’t even remember picking up. ‘The charm?’ she said.
‘He still has it.’ Eric told his story, the hardest part explaining his motives in following Case, since he’d done it with her own words echoing in his ears. Siel paced back and forth while she listened, tugging on her braids so hard it surely hurt her. The part about Kiown she asked him to repeat word for word, and her eyes shut when she heard it the second time. She said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s all true. Even the part about Nightmare.’
She said nothing, but gestured for him to continue, wiping a fresh tear from her face. When he told her about the war mage, her eyes narrowed and fists clenched. ‘They want you back with Anfen,’ she said, incredulous.
‘So it’d seem. Case thought the war mage was just nuts, acting on its own, not on orders.’
She scoffed again and paced along the ledge, thinking. People still bustled around them, many now watching the northern gate, at which a steady pounding could be heard from the invaders’ battering rams. ‘So much you think you know,’ she said after a while.
‘Of Kiown, you mean?’
Her laugh was bitter. ‘And Anfen, of course.’
‘What do you mean? You don’t think he’s in league with—?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know any more. But I see now why Kiown would fuck anything that moved but not me. I’d learn his secrets.’
They both watched the carnage below for a while without speaking. ‘Why not go riding?’ she said at last. ‘Let’s discover the rest of the surprises. If there are provisions left at our inn, we’ll take what we can, but I doubt the important people will have left much behind. No matter. We’ll be riding through safer country this time, provided no Invia come for you, Marked one.’
‘Where are we headed? Is Anfen even here?’
‘He’s off to destroy the Wall at World’s End,’ she said and laughed. She looked down again at the now eerily quiet streets. ‘Maybe he’s right to try it, whatever the Mayors say. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to stop him. We may soon know. Let’s get horses.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘And I hope your friend shows up.’ It was no well-wishing: because I intend to slice him up the middle, her wide dark eyes had said.
61
A human flood poured south: refugees clogged the roads, clutching what possessions they’d been able to carry through the frantic press of escaping bodies through the southern gate. The road was littered here and there with things cast aside as the realities of travel sank in, and a day or two of hauling excess weight proved plenty enough. The inns between Elvury and the closest city, Yinfel, were so stuffed that patrons paid big money to sleep under tables in their pubs, or in their closets. A good number refused to stop moving, certain the Tormentors would pursue them. But no new sightings were heard of.
News of Elvury’s doom travelled along the road much faster than the trudge of its refugees, spreading to the other Free Cities, whose forces frantically checked their underground passages and ramped up defences. Tormentors were now widely known of and rumoured to be attacking at the castle’s behest. There had indeed been sightings of them in remote places, usually from far away, those who saw them not having known what they saw, those who’d got too close not surviving to report it.
Through these nearly impassable crowds, Siel and Eric set out. That first day he slipped from his mount four times, miraculously escaping broken bones. They were fine steeds, tall and muscled as racing horses. Siel and Eric discovered why the ‘important folk’ hadn’t wished to brave travel on ground-level through the deadly stampede for the southern gate. On one nightmarish street half a dozen Tormentors had gathered to stand around motionless in strange poses, victims littered about their feet. The huge ones had slunk back towards the river as though all following the same impulse and, according to talk, stood motionless along the banks watching people flee, bodies impaled all over them, some still slowly writhing and screaming for help. The Tormentors loose in the city were bad enough; looters, invading soldiers, raging fires and occasional riots had not made things any safer.
The only light moment for Eric and Siel was when they found Loup patiently waiting by the roadside for them with a wide toothless smile and his own plundered horse.
Most on the road, Siel and Eric included, tried not to think about what they’d left behind. They tried to shut out the wailing of refugees unused to war so close at hand and no longer a distant abstraction, unused to being caught in the shadows of a man-god’s descending feet. It had all been so quiet for so long, the state of conflict between the Free and Aligned worlds … tense, but out of sight like an earthquake brewing. The shock on the refugees’ sleep-deprived faces said it all, the stagger of their walk as though under new and terrible weight, the disbelief as it sank in: We’re not going home tonight. There is no ‘home’.
Eric felt guilty at his relief on finally passing the grim-faced vanguard and leaving them behind on the road. Siel made no secret of hers. Loup whistled a tune like he hadn’t a care in the world.
Meanwhile the General leading the invasion had a far larger ‘mop-up’ operation on his hands than he had been led to expect. His men slammed open the city gates at last, lulled by the silence on the other side. He’d expected a few score of the creatures, a hundred at most, not several hundreds of them, all difficult to kill, some huge.
They made a dent in the monsters’ numbers before the last of the invading soldiers were killed or fled, enough to make the real mop-up a job at least possible. The General had missed something: that while men could be sacrificed, so too could generals who walked on ice that got thinner the closer they walked to the throne of power they served. The Strategists had long ago marked him as ‘ambitious’, a potential threat, and sought missions suitably deadly to throw him into, so he might have an honourable death for the rank and file’s gossip, and be useful as a martyr. That his ambition in reality had extended no further than his achieved rank was neither here nor there.
62
Pushing the horses to their limits and changing them frequently gave Sharfy a sour taste, for he felt horses were friends of men more than servants. Anfen believed that too, but something had changed in him since they’d set out. There was a light in his eye Sharfy didn’t much care for, nor did he like the grim silence of their journey, which made every second of it pass so heavily. The road went so much easier and faster with jokes, songs and stories.
Yet he understood what Anfen saw, what the invasion really was: the castle’s hand closing its fist around the world at last. If they could take the unconquerable city in one night — years of planning or not, it looked like one night’s work, and what your enemy thought you were capable of mattered as much as what you actually were capable of — then, surely, they could take the rest of the Free Cities at their leisure. And would. And the Mayors would begin to ponder whether they should resist the inevitable, or bargain and speed it up, to maintain their own places of power. That seemed, from Sharfy’s view, to be written in the lines on Anfen’s face.
Sure enough, such were the former First Captain’s thoughts. Anfen had been set for a lifetime of war against them. He had not expected his side to win
, but nor had he expected to see the war’s end while he still lived. In one night he’d learned the final surrender could be only months away. If the Mayors panicked, as they just might, surrender by tonight was not impossible …
But mostly, he pondered how the Wall might be destroyed as the landscape clip-clopped by and his body was tossed up and down in the saddle. The great dividing road brought him closer and closer but no ideas came. Few of the confiscated readings had mentioned the Wall. He knew only that it had existed longer than the cities had, longer than humans had. The Wall may have been made by the dragon-youth, or the great Dragon, or by some like force on its other side.
As Otherworld existed on one end of Levaal, it was held there was a world on the Wall’s other side. This was claimed by ancient scrolls and artefacts left by the dragon-youth to the first generation of people, along with several other parting gifts of knowledge, all long lost. If Tormentors came from that side, and they weren’t some secret creation of the castle’s, what other horrors would pour across if Anfen’s mission succeeded?
But no. He was well past asking whether or not he should.
They kept trading horses at stables along the way as they upped their pace and put days and leagues behind them. Anfen was merciless. They went past good inns, to Sharfy’s growing dismay; he was sick to death of the road and had promised himself a lengthy rest if he made it back alive from their mission in the north. If he broke ranks and stayed at an inn, he had no doubt Anfen would go on without him. Maybe I should let him, Sharfy thought more than once, before realising: I’m not really here to destroy the Wall. Of course not. Stupid! It can’t even be done. I’m here to look after him. He’s coming unstuck like we all thought he might, one day …
The Pilgrims: Book One (The Pendulum Trilogy) Page 36
