by David Hair
*
He woke again. At least he wasn’t attached to the arse-end of a stinking donkey this time. He still felt battered and raw; he’d struggled against Wornu until Hessaz had produced a cold blade and held it against his jugular vein, then cut his throat. After that it all got blurry, though he could recall the feel of Huriya’s lips against the cut, and her mouth brimming with blood. She’d swallowed it, infused it with her gnosis as he lay dying, then at the last second vomited the glowing scarlet fluid into his mouth. A convulsive gulp had sealed his fate: a simple, disgusting process, so basic he wondered more people didn’t know of it. Here was Nasette’s secret laid bare: not pregnancy, nor being wounded, nor fucking … she’d ingested gnostically-infused blood.
After that, he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live.
I’m not a coward. Cowards are like Seth Korion, who blubs in the face of hostility and aggression. I’m just rational: what would be the sense of dying? It’s just what Kore-bedamned Adamus Crozier or Fronck Quintius would want. I can still restore my family. I can still stand before Emperor Constant, Scytale in hand, purified anew and Saviour of the Empire …
After he’d thought that through, it wasn’t so hard to swear loyalty to the little mudskin harlot and her devil brood. It was the practical choice. Death achieved nothing. Survivors won. Winners survived. And he didn’t doubt that it had worked – he could feel it to the depths of his bones. I’m a Souldrinker now …
‘How do you feel?’ Huriya purred from beside his ear. He opened his eyes and looked about him. He was in a tiny little hut, a mud hovel with a straw roof and a single cot laid against one wall. The stink of a slop bucket assaulted his nostrils, and the spice-laden smell of something glooping towards the boil on the tiny fire.
He was lying on his back, naked, but wrapped in a blanket. He felt … well enough, he decided tentatively. Alive. Functional, though his gnosis was still chained up. No, more than that, it was also empty, like a stomach awaiting a meal. He craved … not food, but something. The Chain-rune dulled that hunger, though.
He faced the little Keshi witch. ‘It worked?’
Huriya’s face was full of self-satisfied cleverness. ‘Yes. You are now one of us. “God’s Rejects” is the term you use, I believe. You have no gnosis unless you kill and drain another’s soul … but you’re Chained anyway. Your former brethren would kill you on sight – if you were lucky. If they take you alive, I understand the “correct” punishment is to be hanged, drawn, quartered, and then roasted over a slow fire to expunge your body of evil. Your living kin will then be put to death and your possessions will revert to the Church. Am I correct?’
He nodded mutely.
‘Excellent. There is no way to cure this affliction, except with the Scytale of Corineus: an artefact thought to be beyond hope of extraction in a vault somewhere in Pallas. Except that now it turns up in the hands of a Rondian mage and a Lakh market-girl. Incredible, yes?’
‘You’d never let me use it, even if I placed it in your hands.’
‘Why should I not? Once we are all equal in the eyes of the Kore, what reason remains for persecution? We would bring all our brethren into the light, and believe me, there are a lot of us – not as many as the magi, but with the Scytale, we would not be short of new friends. A new Ritual of Ascension, to found a new empire.’
‘That’s a fantasy.’ But as he considered, the more he thought, Why not?
‘See,’ Huriya said warmly. ‘You’re coming around.’
‘I’ve sworn vows—’
‘To faithless men who threw your life away. And the life of your lover, too, yes?’
He blinked. Raine … It had been weeks since he’d thought of her. A vision of his last sight of her face as the Dokken buried her and began to rip her apart swam across his eyes. ‘I love you’, she said, who’d sworn she was incapable of ‘that emotion’. Did I love her too? How does one even tell? And what does it matter anyway?
Love doesn’t exist. Just lust and hunger.
‘You don’t owe your former masters anything, Malevorn Andevarion. But you owe me your life.’
He closed his eyes and churned through various scenarios of escape, of somehow gaining the Scytale on his own and restoring it, despite being a stranger lost in a hostile land without access to the gnosis. Then he abandoned such notions for the foolishness they were.
The bitch is right. I have no choice.
He exhaled heavily and met her gaze. He gave her his most meaningful melt-your-heart look and said, ‘You are right, my Queen. I do reject them. I pledge my true loyalty to you alone.’
Was there a flash of girlish coyness in the satisfied look on her face?
*
They travelled on, riding captured wild horses, bareback and primitive, fringing the coastal ranges as they left Dhassa and entered southern Kesh. A few towns were set about a giant bay Huriya called the Rakasarphal. There was some story about it that the Dokken told each other, something about a Creator-God and a serpent. Malevorn was amused to hear these primitives and their ignorance, but he was careful to hide it now. The Rakasarphal was a spectacular place, regardless, the delta a maelstrom of constricted seas, the cliffs dwarfing even those on the Dhassan and Pontic coastlines. The damp air kept this land relatively green, though the salt had seeped deep into the soil, which prevented extensive agriculture. It was, however, mercifully cool.
They still hated him, of course: they still kicked him and slyly raked him with claws and teeth. But they found him clothing and they fed him and gave him water, and they let him ride alone – unarmed, but controlling his own steed.
To put them off guard, he devoted himself to his new queen, tended her horse at day’s end, gathered wood for her fire and learned how to boil and spice the vegetables and grains they bartered for in the villages. His skin turned pink and peeled, his wounds scabbed over and turned to a morass of scars, then darkened as if he were turning Noorie. But he was alive. He began to lay plans again.
Where are you, Alaron Mercer? And how will it feel to drink your soul?
Southern Dhassa and Kesh, on the continent of Antiopia
Jumada (Maicin) to Rajab (Julsep) 929
11th to 13th months of the Moontide
Cym perched on a wide rock at the lip of a narrow gully, a dead hare lying beside her, its fur charred by her mage-bolt. The rock warmed her pleasantly after another day spent in the close and foetid darkness below. She went naked, to preserve the useful life of her tattered tunic and boots. Her feet were now hard as leather anyway, and her skin browner than the sand.
Luna rose, and sent the usual shiver through her: she’d always found the moon’s vast weight in the skies above unnerving. Hungry now, she slid across the rock and down into the cavern below.
A rumbling sound rose from beside the cavern’s small pool: the loud snoring of a lion. She barely noticed it as she walked to the smoothest rock wall and gouged another mark in the surface. There were fifty-seven strokes carved there, one for every night she’d spent here with her patient. Two months that felt like an eternity. She lit the fire she’d prepared earlier then skinned and gutted the hare, skewering chunks of flesh on green twigs to roast.
The lion woke and rumbled, a plea for water. There wasn’t a noise or movement of his that she didn’t understand. She’d washed his wounds and sealed them with the gnosis, and spent weeks cleaning away his shit and piss. She’d fed him and watered him, kept him warm through the cold nights; devoted her days to him.
She still wasn’t sure why. It was too complicated.
When she’d bent over him that day, with freedom beckoning and time precious, it would have been so easy. She tried to walk away – but she couldn’t. Instead she’d beaten off the vultures and used the gnosis to lift him and take him north out of the Noose, questing ahead with her Water-gnosis until she found the hidden cavern and its treasure: the promise of life in this arid land. A pair of foxes were using it as a den, but she’d killed them and fed him the m
eat. She’d worked the arrow out of his body with excruciating slowness, using the gnosis, where she could. There were always broken bones to set and wounds and illnesses to treat in her father’s caravan, so she’d been healing ever since she gained the gnosis. She had a talent for it – though she was almost entirely self-taught as neither Alaron nor Ramon had ever paid much attention in those classes – but Zaqri’s wound was the deadliest she’d ever worked on, and it had taken all her patience and concentration. When she’d finally eased the shaft from his flank, she’d never felt such pride.
After that, letting him die would have been a waste.
Since then it had been long, slow days of close care, interspersed with hunting, something she still struggled with. But being a mage had its advantages, and she persevered. Sometimes she sensed scrying, which sent her scuttling for the cave, but there hadn’t been many attempts, and the last one was weeks ago.
After three weeks, she worked up the courage to return to the Dokken camp. She found nothing but three lances topped with eyeless, desiccated skulls. There was nothing left to identify them but a few clumps of hair clinging to the scalp. The nearby ground had been dug up, hinting at mass graves beneath. There was nothing to scavenge: the camp itself was nothing but churned sand and ash, her flying carpet was charred beyond repair and the gem was gone.
At night she lay against the lion to share warmth. He slumbered uneasily, moaning softly, but his wound remained uninfected and gradually his breathing became easier. She didn’t think too closely about what she was doing, or why. It just felt right: payment for his protection, perhaps, when she’d been his prisoner.
It means I can kill him in good conscience, she told herself.
She was aware that he was unconsciously drawing on the gnosis to survive, and that his reservoir of magical strength was running low. For two months he had been little more than a beast, but thirst for the gnosis was drawing him back to awareness. She could see his eyes clearing and tonight, for the first time since this ordeal began, she could feel the presence of the man within the beast.
‘Buonasera,’ she said. ‘Water?’
A throaty growl. Yes. She scooped a handful and fed it to him gently, feeling a jitteriness in her stomach. He was returning to himself and she was going to have to deal with that. Now the danger was over the urge for flight returned; the need to move on and leave him. Alaron was on the run from the Dokken and the Inquisition and doubtless in trouble. And he had the Scytale, the prize of nations.
But when the lion fixed her with his big eyes, she couldn’t move. His throat moved awkwardly and inarticulate sounds came out. He was trying to speak, human words, with a mouth that was incapable. He growled, a frightening sound in the close cavern, but she recognised it for nothing more than frustration.
He tried to rise, straining his limbs, but his whole body refused. He’d been on his side for so long, the muscles had atrophied and seized up. He mewled and whimpered, then snarled in helpless anger.
She rolled out of reach and left him to it. There was nothing she could do now. The rest would be up to him.
They slept apart for the first time since they’d come here. She stayed above, clothed and armed, waking in the faint light of dawn to hear the lion prowling below, growling at his inability to scrabble from the cavern.
‘Zaqri,’ she called, and used telekinetic gnosis to boost him up the slope, onto the rock face at the base of the crevice. He snorted, peering upwards with longing eyes at the seam of light above. Then he scrambled towards her on shaky legs, his paws cascading dust and sand behind him, and he clambered into the daylight.
Now what?
He looked about him, blinking dazedly in the light, tried to roar. It was a strained, weak sound compared to his normal earth-shaking bellow, but it still made her chest swell and her eyes moist. She’d saved him. She no longer owed him anything. Except vengeance.
She’d intended to move on then, but two days later she was still there. She found she couldn’t abandon him, not when she realised his plight; he was too weak to hunt, and he hadn’t changed back from lion to human because he couldn’t. His subconscious had forgotten the way back.
Let that be my vengeance, part of her thought.
But she couldn’t leave it there. She needed him if she was to find Alaron and the Scytale. The problem stole her sleep and sent her pacing the night, beseeching Mater Luna for answers.
Mater Luna sent a hunter.
He was a scrawny man from a nearby village, clad in a loincloth, holding a throwing spear. She saw him coming a mile off, heading for this very outcrop, the highest local vantage point. She wriggled into the crevice, masked Zaqri’s snoring with illusion, and waited. The hunter came closer, moving quietly from rock to rock, using the contours of the land to conceal himself, until he surprised her with how close he was. He clambered up the rock to survey the wide lands, searching for prey.
She slipped out behind him, kindling her gnosis, painfully aware that she was crossing a line. She had stolen before, from dear friends as well as strangers, but to kill a man – that was different.
I have to find Alaron. I have no choice.
Some instinct warned him, a moment before her mage-bolt exploded into his chest and he was thrown backwards. He struck his head and went still.
Pater Sol, forgive me.
I must watch, as penance for my sin. First she lowered the unconscious man down into the cavern, which woke the lion. Zaqri quickly realised what was on offer. He looked up at her with an unreadable expression in his lion eyes, then his jaws salivated, and he struck. The first bite broke the man’s neck, and as he died, Zaqri moved his head to above the man’s mouth and sucked. She saw the lion’s aura change and climbed out of the pit, praying to Mater Lune for forgiveness.
When she returned, Zaqri was asleep again. In human form. She used her telekinesis to remove and bury the hunter’s remains, then watched the night march past, feeling like the most evil woman alive.
*
Next morning she was cooking a bird when he emerged from the hole. He had a blanket wrapped around his waist. ‘You came back for me,’ he said, his voice rusty. ‘You healed me.’
His voice thrilled through her, the first words spoken to her in more than two months. The way her pulse quickened and her skin went moist was disturbing. ‘I did,’ she acknowledged warily.
‘Why?’
Because I had to. ‘I found you. You were still alive.’ She looked away. ‘You would have done the same for me.’
To her relief, he didn’t press the question. Instead, his eyes flew out into the middle distance, and he asked in a haunted, horrified voice, ‘The pack? There was an attack …’
‘They’ve gone.’
‘Then … did they—? Were many killed … ?’
‘I don’t know. I went to the campsite. There were no bodies, but the earth had been dug over, and the stink of death was everywhere. There were three heads spiked on lances, like trophies.’
‘The Inquisitors would have buried their own,’ Zaqri noted. ‘As we would have.’ He closed his eyes. ‘There must have been many losses.’
She felt for him, to her surprise. How many had survived? Faces and names she’d not thought of for days returned: Wornu, Hessaz, Tomacz the Eldest, Fasha, the Brician woman Darice, Kenner the cock-waver, Kraderz, Elando … Huriya – no, hopefully not her …
‘I heard the women call for aid,’ he told her. ‘It drove the Noose completely from my mind. I forgot all caution. Hessaz shot me – she would have finished me off, but I managed to convey to her what was happening. She left then, to try and save her daughter. She left me to die.’
‘I guessed as much,’ she told him. ‘Wornu was like you: he stopped hunting the moment the first call came.’
Zaqri looked affected by that. ‘He loved the pack too, in his way.’ He looked at Cym. ‘And you?’
‘I ran … But then I saw the vultures and found you.’
‘If the pack had come ba
ck, they would have renewed the Noose. You did well to hide us.’ He moved finally, sat on his haunches, hugged his knees. ‘But now we are without a pack. Outcasts.’
We. A little word that loomed large when he spoke it.
‘How long have we been hiding?’ he asked. His voice was throaty with disuse.
‘Two months,’ she told him miserably. Two months, while Alaron gets further and further away …
‘Sol et Lune!’ he swore. ‘I’ve never been so long in animal form. I don’t think I would have found my own way back without you.’ He glanced up at the moon, pale in the dusky sky. ‘I wonder where your friend is now?’
‘Dead, I’m sure. Or so far away he may as well be.’ She blinked away tears. ‘If Huriya didn’t get him, the Inquisition would. He doesn’t stand a chance.’
‘He evaded us for long enough. You shouldn’t give up hope.’
‘Maybe.’ She looked him over. His lean, pale face was shrouded in a golden beard and shaggy hair, and he was markedly thinner, his body whittled away by the battle for survival. But his chest was still massive, the corded muscles in his arms and legs still taut: male perfection, despite all that he’d been through. He was enough to make her breathe faster. He got up, and she stood too, letting him come to her and enveloping her in his arms. She breathed in the sun-baked smell of him, the animal scents and the blood. Slowly, she returned his embrace, let him sniff her hair, stroke her back, savouring her first human contact for longer than she could recall.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘I owe you everything.’
She put her hand on his chest, pushed him away. ‘Yesterday, you … we … killed a man. We should move before his kin come looking.’
He nodded heavily. ‘For what I put you through, I’m sorry. I should be able to care for myself.’
‘It was my choice.’ She pushed him away. ‘So, you’re the one who can put a value on these things: what is a life worth in these lands? What is the … weyrgild?’ she asked, sarcastically.
