The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  Just as before, she had the distinct sensation of being watched. From between the shutters. From the far end of alleyways and from the rooftops. From the few stalls that stood at the edges of the near-deserted market square, the stallholders bunching together to guard their wares. They stared up at her, surly and unwelcoming, but unlike her previous visit, she did not feel intimidated by them.

  “Stand guard,” Cassia told the quartet of shieldmen as she tethered the horses outside the entrance to the town’s temple. “Send one of your number in to warn me if a crowd begins to gather.”

  The nearest of the quartet – it might have been the one that she had awakened first, but it was difficult to be certain – nodded acknowledgement and lifted one hand to its chest in salute. It turned to the others and, to Cassia’s surprise, appeared to communicate silently with them. It was the first time she had seen them do that. Arca, half-dismounted, shot her a wary glance.

  “They’re talking to each other.”

  “You don’t trust them,” Cassia noted.

  Arca grunted. “I can’t trust what I can’t hear.”

  “And the voices in your head: do you trust those?”

  He glared at her and said nothing.

  Cassia was already halfway up the small flight of crumbling steps. It felt good to stretch her muscles after yet another day in the saddle. There was a tension in her body that had not been there earlier, a sense of the confrontation to come. She beckoned Arca after her and the old man followed reluctantly, hitching at his belt with one hand while using a staff to steady himself with the other.

  “Feyenn and Alcibaber,” Cassia read the inscriptions on the fascia. “Did Dorias ever mention those names?”

  “Not that I recall,” Arca said. It was clear he did not want to remember.

  They were not Hellean gods, Baum had said. Nothing to do with the Empire. The temple had been here for a long time. Cassia looked at the portico with fresh insight. Now she believed she knew what she was looking for, it came to her as plain as the fingers of her hand. The stone blocks that formed the entrance to the temple were carved in places with overlapping geometric shapes. They might have been intended to depict tiles, but Cassia saw them differently. She had felt ridges like those shifting under her hands on two occasions. The V-shaped pattern that ran along the borders of columns and the empty spaces where once there would have been plastered frescos – they could be mountains, or vales, or only decorative marks, but she saw them as teeth. Fangs, sawing across the structure of the temple.

  Feyenn and Alcibaber. Corrupted names – as corrupted as the people who had made Lyriss their home. As she entered the temple’s main ground she ran through the names she could remember from the legion of tales of the Age of Talons. There was bound to be at least one name that fit.

  Cassia strode up the middle of the temple ground, barely looking at the statues in the alcoves along each wall. She remembered them from her first visit. An accumulation of old gods and new, Northern and Hellean, as though between them the temple might assemble enough divine providence to protect the town. The only one that interested her stood in the very last alcove on the left: that one had been hacked and defaced until it was unrecognisable. It had, Cassia thought now, once possessed stone wings.

  “Do you recognise this one?” she asked.

  She had to wait for Arca to catch her up, and then he peered at the figure as though he expected it to step from its plinth as the shieldmen had done. “No.”

  Perhaps he had run out of words last night.

  “Dorias!” she called out. “Dorias! Priest! You have visitors!”

  The silence was so protracted she feared the old man might have died. Only the faint eruption of coughing from inside the dank building gave her any kind of reply. Arca muttered something, making a warding sign at his breast, but she ignored his caution and stepped inside.

  This time there was no fire lit in the priest’s quarters. The altars at the rear of the temple were empty, the flagstones around them littered with whatever had blown in through the doorway over the last weeks. The door on the right wall, which should have been locked, was broken open, the blackened wood lying in splintered planks on the floor. Cassia did not need more than a glance to know that the room had been looted. Anything of value would be long gone by now.

  The coughing continued from the darkened room to the left. “Dorias,” she called again.

  “. . . oh, company, company, more blessed voices . . . too late by far . . .”

  She had to strain to make out the words. The old priest was hidden in a pile of blankets on his filthy cot. The hearth was dark, and Cassia could see it had not been lit for days. The stools and the chest that the priest once possessed were missing. It seemed the townsfolk had finally decided to prey upon their own. She felt anger rising from the pit of her stomach. Back in Keskor it would not have mattered which god a temple was dedicated to – Northern or Hellean – that ground was sacred. Untouchable.

  Behind her she heard debris kicked across the temple floor. More muttered words from Arca as he used the excuse of the ransacked storeroom to put off the inevitable.

  “Dorias. What happened?”

  “. . . charity . . .”

  She crouched and hauled the blankets back. The little that remained of Dorias’s flesh was blotched, stark pale patches showing up the bruises. Cuts and weals that she guessed had been made by staves and farm tools. His hands were bloody wrecks – he had fought back, or he had defended himself, but he was not the soldier he had been in his youth. His nose was broken, and his eyes could not focus.

  “Arca, I need your help,” she called out.

  “. . . Arca . . .” the ruined old man echoed.

  Cassia could not see what to do. There was no way she could move Dorias from his bed, not if she still wanted to make her meeting with Rais on the other side of the Antiachas. Not even if three hundred more shieldmen came and built a cart for Dorias to be carried upon. It was plain that, unable to help himself, he had lain here alone and without food, ready to die. It was not the way a soldier of the legion should die, not like this, in the corner of a temple dedicated to gods who did not exist.

  “Dear gods, just let him die.”

  She looked up and saw Arca standing in the doorway. His expression was set like stone as he stared at what had once been his fellow legionary. She thought back to the story of his last, desperate stand against the men who attempted to abduct the Lady Lianna. The wounds he had received in that fight; how close he came to death. It must seem to him now that he looked down upon himself.

  What was it the priest of Aemwell had said to him? Saihri kept your life, not I. And Dorias should already have been dead.

  He had been waiting for her. They had been waiting for her. Feyenn and Alcibaber. They had kept him alive when he should have died.

  The gods are cruel to those whose prayers they answer, the priest had said.

  “Dorias,” she said. The man’s eyes flickered behind half-closed lids. “Tell your gods I am here. Baum is dead, and Caenthell is free. I am the Heir to the North, and I will hold them to the task they were first given.”

  She raised her voice so the words echoed back into the temple itself. “Do you hear me, Feyenn? Alcibaber? Your time is come.”

  Dorias coughed and shook beneath his blankets. Flecks of dark bile appeared on the bundled rags that doubled as a pillow, and his breath rattled. Cassia lifted his head gently, and as much as she dared, to ease the effort of each inhalation.

  “. . . Arca . . . ?”

  “I’m here,” the old soldier said. “Don’t try to speak, you fool – save your strength.”

  “. . . I had to come . . .”

  “As did I, in the end. Rest, Dorias. Sleep.”

  His strength seemed to be fading by the second. Whatever means his gods had used to sustain him, they no longer worked. Feyenn and Alcibaber had abandoned him at the last.

  “Dorias,” she said, unable to keep the urgency fro
m her voice. “Dorias, did they hear? Will they come?”

  The air in the small room, already fouled, was suddenly unbearably heavy, forcing the breath from her lungs. It was the weight of another presence in the room – something powerful and invisible, witnessing the priest’s death from above.

  Some sort of god.

  Dorias’s gaze lit upon her, focused for an instant. “Yes.”

  The pressure lifted. It took Dorias’s soul with it.

  Yes, Cassia thought, the priest’s last word embedded in her mind. Yes, the gods were cruel.

  But not so cruel as dragons.

  13

  Arca would not leave him in that room. He insisted Dorias was brought out into the temple ground, into the light. It did not require much effort to lift the priest’s corpse. He had been little more than skin and bones when Cassia first met him, and he seemed even less than that now.

  They laid him on the open ground between the colonnades, so the gods could look upon him. Arca knelt at his feet, his movements stiff and awkward as he grieved for a fallen comrade. Cassia waited to one side, aware that she needed to hurry him, yet unwilling to do so. She examined the statues in the alcoves instead, returning almost inevitably to the vandalised one that sat closest to the main building. The more she looked at it, the more it appeared to dominate the open ground. The other statues, old as they were, did not have the sheer weight it possessed. More real every moment, she thought.

  How old was this temple, really? The outer walls had been repaired – and even replaced – several times from what little she could discern, but the temple itself must have been here for centuries, along with the ancient representations of the Northern gods. And Feyenn and Alcibaber, of course. She knew how that worked now; all she needed was for the gods themselves to confirm it for her.

  She knew that confirmation would not be long in coming.

  Heavy footsteps at the portico. Cassia looked up to see one of her shieldmen standing inside the doorway. It looked expectant, as much as carved stone could be said to have an expectant expression.

  “It’s time to go,” she said aloud.

  Arca did not lift his head. “Not yet.”

  Cassia sighed. “Arca, this is neither the place nor the time for a heroic last stand.”

  He came slowly to his feet, noticing the shieldman at last. His face, already lined with pain and regret, hardened into anger. “I choose to disagree.”

  He unsheathed his sword as he walked towards the portico. The blade still looked too heavy for him, though he held it easily enough. Cassia cursed under her breath and headed after him, tugging at her own weapon. Pelicos’s blade; the easiest of the two to carry, despite the fact that she practiced more with Meredith’s sword now.

  She heard the gathering before she saw it; mutterings of anger from out in the town’s square. When she edged past the shieldman’s broad shoulders to emerge onto the portico she realised Lyriss was not as deserted as she had thought. The populace had merely been waiting behind closed doors. The town must have received word ahead of her arrival – perhaps they had believed her and Arca to be envoys from the Emperor. Scouts for the legions, chasing down the Lyrissans who had ventured further afield to raid other towns for their harvests. Tax collectors, perhaps. Roughly thirty men had gathered in the square, assembled in a loose horseshoe around the temple steps to prevent any escape. Farmhands and tradesmen, the types of men she had seen in the streets of Keskor and tens of other towns of the North. Men who might have deserted from the legions, or perhaps joined her father in bawdy songs in one of the horrible dens he often abandoned her to frequent. Men in whose company she had never been comfortable. One or two had blades or pikearms, but most had come with the tools of their trades, or with slings and stones. In some ways that worried her more than any number of swords would have done. She was confident that the shieldmen’s stone bodies would resist any but the heaviest blows from edged weapons, but she was less certain of the hammers that masons and blacksmiths alike used. And several men in the front ranks of the mob hefted such weapons.

  The other shieldmen stood in a line between the Lyrissans and the horses. They had drawn their own weapons and stood ready to throw the crowd back. It was the first time Cassia had seen her stone soldiers do anything other than march northwards, and her breath caught as she hurried forwards, past one of those massive blades, praying this confrontation would not come to bloodshed.

  Arca had already stepped beyond the safety of the line of shieldmen. He glared at each man in turn, but Cassia could not fail to notice that his hands trembled and the tip of his sword wavered. Anger warred against his ill-health as he tried to be Arca the Brave one more time.

  “I hope you have a very good explanation for your behaviour,” he said in flat tones that made the nearest men take half a step backwards. Others muttered under their breath and made gods-fearing signs across their chests. Cassia stepped up to join him, hoping the mob would be less keen to attack if confronted by two steel blades, even if one was wielded by a woman.

  “You’ve brought evil to this town,” one of the men spat. He had a long, sallow face, his nose bent to one side and his beard so matted and unkempt Cassia could hardly see his mouth. “You owe us. Compensation.”

  A murmur of loose agreement rippled through the mob. Smash the abominations. Take the horses. Take the girl. Cassia sensed the horseshoe tightening around her. She shifted slowly and deliberately into a stance Meredith had shown her – light on the balls of the feet, the sword close to her breast so it could not be knocked from her hand.

  “Compensation? For our evil?” Arca repeated. “You murdered a man. Your own priest.”

  “For little more than the tithes you owed him,” Cassia pointed out.

  “He was no priest,” the bearded man said. “He had no gods.”

  “He was mad,” a younger lad put in. “He brought nothing but bad luck to Lyriss, ever since he came here.”

  “The crops are failing. He never brought any gods to help us.”

  “And then the madness spread. He set evil spirits against us.”

  “He was a priest,” Arca insisted.

  The man with the matted beard spat again. Most of the spittle remained on his chin, but he seemed not to notice. “No priest, him. He cursed us. Said there’d be no spring here. Just winter.”

  “Look at them hills,” the lad said. “All dark. Like it’s creepin’ south to us. He did that.”

  Cassia had become so used to what she saw on the northern horizons since she left Galliarca that she no longer really noticed it. It was a shock to realise that the skies to the north were now noticeably dark throughout the day – that the unnatural mass of clouds she had glimpsed from Craw’s back had grown so much that they came close to casting shadows over Lyriss itself. Little wonder the superstitious folk of this town had turned upon their priest.

  Little wonder perhaps, but an unforgivable act nonetheless.

  It took her a moment longer to realise what else she saw up there on the hillsides: thick banks of fog, rolling down the contours of the land like floodwater.

  Down towards Lyriss itself.

  “And look what you brought here – more foul magic!”

  “Abominations!”

  “Like them the damned priest had!”

  “You think I look like a bloody sorcerer? Listen to us, for Saihri’s sake!”

  Arca still argued with the bearded man, every word bringing them closer to a fight she could not afford. It was senseless to avenge Dorias in this way, but it would be difficult to make Arca see the truth of that. She turned back to face the young lad again, to discover that he had closed the distance between them, one hand outstretched to grab at her wrist. To disarm her. As though it would be the easiest thing in the world to take a sword from a girl little older than himself.

  Cassia disabused him of that notion.

  She twisted back, spun around him, and tripped him onto his face. He landed hard on the ground, tendrils of
mist puffing out around his body. Another half-breath brought her back into a guard stance ready for the next man. The mists played around her own feet, and she watched them move in horror. This would be like Karakhel.

  No – it was not the same. Not quite. The incessant drumming of the North still played inside her head, but it was distant, not hammering at her skull. This magic came from elsewhere. Somewhere closer at hand.

  The mob was on the verge of attack. Even the presence of the shieldmen would not hold them back. If ever there had been a time for rational debate in this hellhole of a town, it was long gone.

  A hand grabbed her ankle, seeking to topple her. Cassia kicked out at the prone lad, catching him just above his elbow. It wasn’t quite enough to shake him off, but the damage was done. She was distracted from the men before her, and they poured in to disarm her. Behind her, she heard Arca stifle a curse; somebody else cried out in pain.

  “Shieldmen!” Cassia shouted, just as a dirty hand descended over her mouth. She tore her head to one side and bit down hard, tasting blood and soil.

  More shouts and thumps. Cassia tumbled abruptly to the ground, the breath driven from her along with her reflexes. All she could see was a jumble of boots and bare feet, like an ant’s view of a scuffle.

  The sky lit up for a moment as though the Galliarcan summer had come again. The ground lurched, sending men to their hands and knees amidst cries of terror. The thunder that followed, rolling through Cassia’s bones, shook Lyriss into silence.

  Cassia hauled herself onto her knees and cast about for her sword. It lay nearby, still in the hand of the man who had wrested it from her. The man himself lay further away, blood coursing from the stump of his arm. One of the shieldmen stood over him, its heavy stone blade dripping onto the ground. Arca was still on his feet. It appeared he had been trying to drive his way to her side. His sword was bloodied and he bore several cuts on both arms.

  The mob had crumbled. They had no taste for violence after all. Many of them were running for the alleys and side streets that led into the back quarters of the town. But those few who remained looked to the North, and the fear of the gods was in their eyes.