‘“Kedjek” isn’t a name,’ Sparhawk replied. ‘It’s an insult.’
The Zemoch’s face went even more pale, and his black eyes narrowed with hate. ‘Women and slaves do not speak so to members of the imperial guard!’ he snapped.
‘Imperial guard,’ Sephrenia sneered. ‘Neither you nor any of your men would make a wart on any part of an imperial guardsman. Say the name of our God so that I may know that you are of the true faith. Say it, Kedjek, lest ye die.’
‘Azash,’ the now-uncertain man muttered.
‘His name is fouled by the tongue which speaks it,’ she told him, ‘but Azash sometimes enjoys defilement.’
The Zemoch straightened. ‘I am commanded to gather the people,’ he declared. ‘The day is at hand when Blessed Otha will stretch forth his fist to crush and enslave the unbelievers of the west.’
‘Obey then. Continue with your work. Be diligent, for Azash rewards lack of zeal with agonies.’
‘I need no woman to instruct me,’ he said coldly. ‘Prepare to take your servants to the place of war.’
‘Your authority does not extend to me.’ She raised her right hand, her palm towards him. The markings about her forearm and wrist seemed to writhe and surge, and the image of the snake’s head hissed, its forked tongue flickering. ‘You have my permission to greet me,’ she told him.
The Zemoch recoiled, his eyes wide with horror. Since the ritual Styric greeting involved the kissing of the palms, Sephrenia’s ‘permission’ was an open invitation to suicide. ‘Forgive me, High Priestess,’ he begged in a shaking voice.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said flatly. She looked at the other Zemochs, who were goggle-eyed with fright. ‘This piece of offal has offended me,’ she told them. ‘Do what is customary.’
The Zemochs leaped from their saddles, pulled their struggling leader from his horse and beheaded him on the spot. Sephrenia, who normally would have viewed such savagery with revulsion, looked on with no change of expression. ‘Adequate,’ she said flatly. ‘Display what remains of him in the usual fashion and go on with your task.’
‘Ah – um – Dread Priestess,’ one of them faltered, ‘we have no leader now.’
‘You have spoken. Therefore you will lead. If you do well, you will be rewarded. If you do not do well, the punishment will be on your head. Now take this carrion out of my path.’ She touched Ch’iel’s flanks with her heels, and the slender white mare moved forward, delicately avoiding the puddles of blood on the ground.
‘Leadership among the Zemochs appears to have certain hazards,’ Ulath observed to Tynian.
‘Truly,’ Tynian agreed.
‘Did you really have to do that to him, Lady Sephrenia?’ Bevier asked in a choked voice.
‘Yes. A Zemoch who offends the Priesthood is always punished, and in Zemoch, there is only one punishment.’
‘How did you make the picture of the snake move?’ Talen asked her, his eyes a little frightened.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘It only seemed to move.’
‘Then it wouldn’t really have bitten him, would it?’
‘He’d have thought it had, and the results would have been the same. How far did Kring tell you to go into this forest, Sparhawk?’
‘About a day’s ride,’ he told her. ‘We turn south at the eastern edge of the woods – just before we get to the mountains.’
‘Let’s ride on, then.’
They were all a bit awed by the apparent change in Sephrenia. The soulless arrogance she had displayed during the encounter with the Zemochs had been so radically different from her normal behaviour that she even frightened them to some degree. They rode on through the shadowy forest in a subdued silence, casting frequent looks in her direction. Finally, she reined in her palfrey. ‘Will you all stop that?’ she said tartly. ‘I haven’t grown another head, you know. I’m posing as a Zemoch priestess, and I’m behaving in exactly the way a priestess of Azash would. When you imitate a monster, you sometimes have to do monstrous things. Now, let’s ride on. Tell us a story, Tynian. Take our minds off the recent unpleasantness.’
‘Yes, little mother,’ the broad-faced Deiran agreed. Sparhawk had noticed that they had all, unconsciously perhaps, taken to addressing her in that form.
They camped in the forest that night and continued the following morning under still-cloudy skies. They were climbing steadily through the forest, and as they progressed, the air grew colder. It was about midday when they reached the eastern edge of the wood and turned south, staying perhaps a hundred yards back under the trees to take advantage of the concealment they offered.
As Kring had advised Sparhawk they would, they reached an extensive grove of blighted trees late in the day. The stark white band of dead trees spilled down from the mountainside like a leprous waterfall, foul-smelling, fungus-ridden and about a league wide. ‘This place looks – and smells – like the outskirts of Hell,’ Tynian said in a sombre tone.
‘Maybe it’s because of the cloudy weather,’ Kalten told him.
‘I don’t think sunshine would help this place very much,’ Ulath disagreed.
‘What could have laid waste so vast a region?’ Bevier asked with a shudder.
‘The earth itself is diseased,’ Sephrenia told him. ‘Let’s not linger too long in this accursed wood, dear ones. A man is not a tree, but the noxious miasma of this forest cannot be healthy.’
‘We’re losing daylight, Sephrenia,’ Kurik said.
‘That won’t be a problem. There’ll be light enough for us to press on after it grows dark.’
‘What was it that diseased the earth, Lady Sephrenia?’ Berit asked, looking around at the white trees thrusting upward from the contaminated soil like imploring skeletal hands.
‘There’s no way to know, Berit, but the reek of this place is the reek of death. Horrors beyond imagining may lie under the ground. Let’s put this place behind us.’
The sky darkened with the approach of evening, but as night fell, the dead trees around them began to give off a sickly, greenish glow.
‘Are you doing this, Sephrenia?’ Kalten asked, ‘making the light, I mean?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘The light isn’t the result of magic’
Kurik laughed a bit ruefully. ‘I should have remembered that,’ he said.
‘Remembered what?’ Talen asked him.
‘Rotten logs and the like glow in the dark sometimes.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘You’ve spent too much time in cities, Talen.’
‘You have to go where your customers are,’ the boy shrugged. ‘You don’t make much profit swindling frogs.’
They rode on through the first hours of night in that faint greenish glow, covering their noses and mouths with their cloaks. Not long before midnight they reached a steep, forested ridge. They rode on for some distance and then set up camp for the remainder of the night in a shallow, wooded basin where the night air seemed unusually sweet and pure after the endless hours in the fetid stink of the dead forest. The prospect they viewed the following morning as they crested the ridge was not a great deal more encouraging. What they had faced the previous day had been dead white. What lay in store for them today was just as dead, but it was black.
‘What on earth is that?’ Talen gasped, staring out over the bubbling expanse of sticky-looking black muck.
‘The tar-bogs Kring mentioned,’ Sparhawk replied.
‘Can we go around them?’
‘No. The tar seeps out of the face of a cliff, and the bogs run on for leagues out into the foothills.’
The tar-bogs appeared to be vast puddles of shiny black, glistening wet, bubbling and stretching to a rocky spur perhaps five miles to the south. Near the far side there rose a plume of bluish flame quite nearly as tall as the spire rising above the cathedral of Cimmura.
‘How can we hope to cross that?’ Bevier exclaimed.
‘Carefully, I’d imagine,’ Ulath replied. ‘I’ve crossed a few quicksand bogs up in Th
alesia. You spend a lot of time probing in front of you with a stick – a long one, preferably.’
‘The Peloi have the trail marked,’ Sparhawk assured them. ‘They’ve poked sticks into solid ground.’
‘Which side of the sticks are we supposed to stay on?’ Kalten asked.
‘Kring didn’t say,’ Sparhawk shrugged. ‘I imagine we’ll find out before we go very far, though.’
They rode down the ridge and moved at a careful walk out into the sticky black quagmire. The air hanging above the bogs was thick with the penetrating odour of naphtha, and Sparhawk began to feel somewhat light-headed after a short distance.
They plodded on, their pace slowed by the need for caution. Great viscous bubbles rose up from the depths of the naphtha sinks around them to pop with odd belching sounds. When they neared the southern end of the bog, they passed the burning pillar, a column of blue flame that roared endlessly as it shot up from the earth. Once they had passed that blazing shaft, the ground began to rise and they were soon out of the bogs. Perhaps it had been the heat from the burning gasses spurting from the earth that made the contrast so noticeable, but when they left the bogs behind, the air seemed much, much colder.
‘We’ve got weather coming,’ Kurik warned. ‘Rain at first most likely, but I think there might be snow behind it.’
‘No trip through the mountains is complete without snow,’ Ulath observed.
‘What are we supposed to look for now?’ Tynian asked Sparhawk.
‘That,’ Sparhawk replied, pointing at a high cliff with broad yellow bands running diagonally across its face. ‘Kring gives very good directions.’ He peered on ahead and saw a tree with a patch of bark slashed away. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘The trail to the pass is marked. Let’s ride on before the rain starts.’
The pass was in fact an ancient stream-bed. The climate of Eosia had changed over the eons, and as Zemoch had grown more and more arid, the stream which had patiently carved the narrow ravine had dried up at its source, leaving a steep gully running back up into the towering cliff.
As Kurik had predicted, the rain began in the late afternoon. It was a steady drizzle that dampened everything.
‘Sir Sparhawk,’ Berit called from the rear. ‘I think you should take a look at this.’
Sparhawk reined in and rode back. ‘What is it, Berit?’
Berit pointed towards the west where the sunset was no more than a lighter shade of grey in the rainy sky. In the centre of that lighter spot hovered an amorphous cloud of inky black. ‘It’s moving the wrong way, Sir Sparhawk,’ Berit said. ‘All the other clouds are moving west. That one’s coming east, right towards us. It looks sort of like the cloud those dawn-men were hiding in, doesn’t it? The one that’s been following us?’
Sparhawk’s heart sank. ‘It does indeed, Berit. Sephrenia!’ he called.
She rode back to join them.
‘It’s there again,’ Sparhawk told her, pointing.
‘So I see. You didn’t expect it to just go away, did you, Sparhawk?’
‘I was hoping. Can we do anything?’
‘No.’
He squared his shoulders. ‘We keep going then,’ he said.
The steep ravine wound up through the rock, and they followed it slowly as evening began to descend. Then they rounded a sharp bend in the ancient course and saw a rockslide, which was not a slide strictly speaking, but rather a collapsed wall – a place where the south face of the gap had broken free and fallen into the ravine to apparently block it entirely.
‘That’s fairly intimidating,’ Bevier observed. ‘I hope Kring gave you good directions, Sparhawk.’
‘We’re supposed to bear to the left here,’ Sparhawk told them. ‘We’ll find a clump of limbs and logs and brush on the downhill side of the rockfall right up against the north wall of the ravine. When we pull those out of the way, we’ll find a passageway leading under the slide. The Peloi use it when they ride back into Zemoch looking for ears.’
Kalten wiped his face. ‘Let’s go and look,’ he said.
The pile of broken-off trees and tangled brush looked quite natural in the rapidly fading light, and it appeared to be no more than one of those random accumulations of driftwood and debris which wash down every ravine during the spring run-off. Talen dismounted, climbed up a steeply slanted log and peered into a dark gap in the tangle. ‘Hello,’ he shouted into the opening. The sound of his voice returned as a hollow echo.
‘Let us know if someone answers,’ Tynian called to him.
‘This is it, Sparhawk,’ the boy said. ‘There’s a large open space behind this pile.’
‘We may as well get to work then,’ Ulath suggested. He looked up at the rainy, darkening sky. ‘We might want to give some thought to spending the night in there,’ he added. ‘It’s out of the weather, and it’s getting dark anyway.’
They fashioned yokes from pieces of driftwood and used the packhorses to pull aside the pile of logs and brush. The mouth of the passageway was triangular, since the outward side leaned against the north face of the ravine. The passage was narrow and smelled musty.
‘It’s dry,’ Ulath noted, ‘and it’s out of sight. We could go back in there a little way and build a fire. If we don’t dry our clothes off, these mail-shirts are going to be solid rust by morning.’
‘Let’s cover this opening first, though,’ Kurik said. He didn’t sound too hopeful about the notion of trying to hide behind a brush-pile from the shadowy cloud which had followed them since Thalesia, however.
After they had covered the opening, they took torches from one of the packs, lit them and followed the narrow passageway a hundred yards or so to a place where it widened out.
‘Good enough?’ Kurik asked.
‘At least it’s dry,’ Kalten said. He kicked at the sandy floor of the passage, turning up a chunk of bleached wood buried there. ‘We might even be able to find enough wood for a fire.’
They set up their camp in the somewhat confined space, and they soon had a small fire going.
Talen came back from the passageway on ahead. ‘It goes on for another few hundred yards,’ he reported. ‘The upper end’s blocked with brush the same way the lower one was. Kring’s very careful to keep this passage hidden.’
‘What’s the weather like on up ahead?’ Kurik asked.
‘There’s some snow mixed with the rain now, father.’
‘It looks as if I was right then. Oh, well, we’ve all been snowed on before, I guess.’
‘Whose turn is it to do the cooking?’ Kalten asked.
‘Yours,’ Ulath told him.
‘It can’t be mine again already.’
‘Sorry, but it is.’
Grumbling, Kalten went to the packs and began to rummage around.
The meal consisted of Peloi trail rations, smoked mutton, dark bread and a thick soup made from dried peas. It was nourishing, but the flavour was hardly spectacular. After they had finished eating, Kalten began to clean up. He was gathering their plates when he suddenly stopped. ‘Ulath?’ he said suspiciously.
‘Yes, Kalten?’
‘In all the time we’ve been travelling together, I haven’t seen you cook more than once or twice.’
‘No, you probably haven’t.’
‘When does your turn come?’
‘It doesn’t. My job is to keep track of whose turn it is. You wouldn’t really expect me to do that and cook too, would you? Fair is fair, after all.’
‘Who appointed you?’
‘I volunteered. Church Knights are supposed to do that when unpleasant tasks come up. That’s one of the reasons people respect us so much.’
They sat around after that, staring moodily into the fire. ‘It’s days like today that make me wonder why I took up knighting for a career,’ Tynian said. ‘I had a chance to go into law when I was younger. I thought it would be boring, so I chose this instead. I wonder why.’
There was a general murmur of agreement.
‘Gentlemen,’ Sephren
ia said, ‘push this kind of thinking from your minds. I’ve told you before that if we grow melancholy or fall into despair, we’ll be falling right into the hands of our enemies. One dark cloud hanging over our heads is enough. Let’s not add clouds of our own making. When the light falters, the darkness wins.’
‘If you’re trying to cheer us up, you’re going at it in a strange way, Sephrenia,’ Talen told her.
She smiled faintly. ‘Perhaps that was a bit dramatic, wasn’t it? The point, my dear ones, is that we all have to be very alert. We must be wary of depression, dejection and above all, melancholy. Melancholy’s a form of madness, you know.’
‘What are we supposed to do?’ Kalten asked her.
‘It’s really quite simple, Kalten,’ Ulath said. ‘You watch Tynian very closely. As soon as he begins behaving like a butterfly, tell Sparhawk about it. I’ll watch you for signs of frogishness. Just as soon as you start trying to catch flies with your tongue, I’ll know that you’re starting to lose your grip on things.’
Chapter 24
There were snowflakes the size of half-crowns mixed with the drizzle that swirled down into the narrow pass. Sooty ravens hunched on tree-limbs, their feathers wet and their eyes angry. It was the kind of morning that cried out for stout walls, a sturdy roof and a cheery fire, but those amenities were not available, so Sparhawk and Kurik wormed their way deeper into the juniper thicket and waited.
‘Are you sure?’ Sparhawk whispered to his squire.
Kurik nodded. ‘It was definitely smoke, Sparhawk,’ he replied in a low voice, ‘and somebody was doing a very bad job of frying bacon.’
‘There isn’t much we can do but wait,’ Sparhawk said sourly. ‘I don’t want to blunder into anybody.’ He tried to shift his position, but he was wedged in between the trunks of two scrubby trees.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kurik whispered.
‘There’s water dripping off a limb just over me. It’s running down the back of my neck.’
Kurik gave him a long, speculative look. ‘How are you feeling, My Lord?’ he asked.
‘Wet. Thanks for asking, though.’
‘You know what I mean. I’m supposed to keep an eye on you. You’re the key to this whole business. It doesn’t really matter if the rest of us start feeling sorry for ourselves, but if you start having doubts and fears, we’re all in trouble.’
The Sapphire Rose Page 42
