by Steven Poore
Rais rode with his sword unsheathed, guiding his mount with corrective nudges from his free hand and his knees. For once he was quiet, and even Teon was affected by the grave mood that had settled upon them all.
The last time she had seen these gates, Cassia had travelled through them in the opposite direction, on her way out of the North. The irony of the circular nature of her journey had not escaped her. If the gods did indeed play cruel games with the fates of mortal men, then surely this would count as one of the greatest of all. In those tales, of course, the hero would have been befriended and advised by some sympathetic god who stood against fate as a matter of honour or principle.
Cassia looked around again at her small force. Regardless of Rais’s opinion of his own worth, she considered him unlikely to be any sort of deity. No, there was no god on this road with her.
They halted within a bowshot of the town’s walls and Cassia left her reins in the hands of one of Teon’s men. He was only as tall as Cassia herself, and his patchy beard hid a youthful face. Suddenly she was glad he had been detailed to guard their escape, rather than enter Devrilinum with her and Rais.
“How well do you know this town?” the prince asked. His voice sounded out of place against the unnatural stillness.
“Well enough,” Cassia replied, and that was the truth. As much as people might have welcomed Norrow as a storyteller, they had welcomed both him and his daughter less as itinerants and scavengers. Rather than spend her time in one spot as she could in Keskor, where at least she’d had the benefit of Hetch’s friendship, here in Devrilinum she’d kicked her way through alleys and the unplanned gaps between houses in search of solace, often one step ahead of unfriendly glances, shoves, and broom handles. In some respects she knew the back ways of many of the towns of the North far better than she knew the main routes.
“I think the market square would be the best place to begin,” Rais said. “If there any supplies still to be found, they should be nearby.”
Cassia nodded. Most town-born traders kept their stores locked in the streets around the square itself; it was the farmers and craftsmen who lived outside the walls who had to drag carts in through the gates every morning. The lock-ups and sheds hidden around the back of the square were usually gated, barred and locked, but Cassia didn’t think any such lock would withstand a shieldman’s fists.
“This road takes us to the square,” she said. “You can just see the roof of the temple of Manethrar off to one side of it.”
“Not too far, as the bird flies,” Rais judged. He drew a deep breath and set his shoulders, and then cast another quick glance at her. He was not eager to enter Devrilinum, she thought, but he was a prince of Galliarca as well as a man of his word. He had travelled this distance with her. He would go further yet if she required it of him. He would look after his interests.
As selfish as his own thoughts might be, he was on her side, and that was a comfort to her. Cassia hoped the smile she flashed him in return did not appear too forced, or too grim.
“Just one moment,” she told him. One of Teon’s men was equipped with a hooded lantern, lit and shielded against the elements, and Cassia used this to set light to the first of the brands she carried. The oil-soaked cloth caught quickly, letting off thick, cloying smoke that she knew would linger at the back of her throat for days.
Rais looked up at the bleak skies. “Even without the sun I doubt we’ll need that for illumination.”
“It’s not to light our way,” Cassia said. “Shall we move on?”
“At your command.” Rais sketched a minimal bow that Cassia thought must be ironic, before he gestured to Teon and the two men led the others towards the town’s gates.
Cassia turned to her own shieldmen and ordered them forwards. Unlike Rais’s soldiers they had no fear of what might lie in wait within the town. They marched like a battering ram of stone, reassuringly solid behind her. Given Rais’s natural – and entirely understandable – caution, Cassia soon caught up with the soldiers and they moved aside without a word to let the shieldmen through.
The first thing she encountered past the town’s gates was a low bench that must once have belonged inside the small tavern that looked out onto the March. The wood was shattered and withered all along one side, and splintered on the other where it had evidently been dragged out into the road. It was as though somebody had decided to take it with them as they fled, only to abandon it after the first few steps.
Cassia lifted her gaze and saw that the scene was repeated over and again all through Devrilinum: shutters torn from windows to lie shredded upon the ground, window frames split, pieces of furniture, clothing, and battered old pans all dropped as though they had fallen from the sky. The town might well be deserted, but it was nowhere near as peaceful as it had appeared from afar.
She led the shieldmen up the street at a more considered pace, peering into the darkened doorways as she passed each one. Devrilinum brooded: dead, yet still capable of breath.
“Cassia,” Rais called softly. Even the prince feared waking the town, she thought.
She slowed her column even further and dropped back to where he still considered the tavern. A few of Teon’s men had gathered enough courage to examine a window frame; others looked nervously into a narrow alley that probably led to the cramped hovels built into the space behind the tavern. Devrilinum, like most small towns of the North, had not wasted the ground it was founded upon. In that respect it was similar to Galliarca – surprisingly so, Cassia thought, but somehow Galliarca had retained an air of spaciousness even in the confines of the mede.
Rais, meanwhile, had knelt to examine the damaged bench. His expression was creased with concentration as he dug the point of his sword into the wood.
“See this? It has almost rotted into ashes.”
“Small wonder they abandoned it,” Teon said at his side.
Cassia shook her head. She had understood Rais’s point. “It’s as though it has been aged beyond time.”
“A poetic description.” Rais smiled up at her, but there was little humour in it. “What would do such a thing – sorcery?”
“Perhaps,” Cassia replied, but she did not think it true. Some power had sucked the very essence from the wood, but it was not the sorcery that Malessar and his ilk practised. Rather, she thought, it was the cursed touch of Caenthell. In the same way the High King’s questing tendrils had blighted the living earth, they had destroyed even that which was itself long-dead. If this was a sign of what lay beyond the failing curse wards . . .
She shivered. “No one would have carried this out here,” she said. “Not if it was already half destroyed.”
“Yet there are marks. Tracks.” Rais stood again. “Leading from the tavern.”
The drums, Cassia realised, had diminished, receding so far from her conscious mind that they barely sounded at all. As if they were waiting.
“We have no time for this,” she said. “We should move more quickly.”
“Into what?” Rais asked, but he motioned to Teon and they started up the street once more, closing the distance that lay between them and the shieldmen.
There were other alleys and side streets, some of which Cassia knew only too well from the time she had spent in Devrilinum. They passed by Fodrakh’s tavern. It looked more dilapidated than ever, plainly deserted, and the black spaces beyond the windows gaped at her, following her movement like soulless eyes. Cassia wondered for a moment what might have happened to Fodrakh himself – he had not been amongst the refugees gathered on the borders of Lyriss, as far as she was aware – but the old drunkard fell from her thoughts as soon as the tavern itself disappeared from view.
“I have the sensation of being watched,” Rais said quietly to her.
Cassia nodded. “I know.”
Every window in the town, even those that were still shuttered, seemed to harbour some lurking presence. On the odd occasions she ventured close enough to one of the buildings to see debris lying on t
he bare floors inside, she felt that the rooms were still . . . occupied. It had not taken much to convince her that searching the interiors of these buildings would be a bad idea. Teon’s soldiers, as eager as they might have been beforehand to strip Devrilinum of supplies, had also begun to steer clear of doorways and dark openings that should normally have carried no threat.
The shieldmen, on the other hand, were not quite as oblivious to their surroundings as she had previously thought them to be. Independently of her own orders, they had split their column to cover both sides of the road. Catching up with the rearmost elements of the column, Cassia’s sense of terror was suddenly lessened, as though the shieldmen were a physical barrier against the malevolence emanating from the town itself.
She looked around at Rais and Teon, and realised they had been affected by this change too. The prince drew himself up, walking with more of the natural bluster of a man born to nobility. Teon, two steps behind him, emulated that swagger as best he could.
“Perhaps we’d better stay between the shieldmen,” she suggested, unable to resist smiling at the sight of the pair. And that in itself had to be a sign that Malessar’s creations were a positive influence against Caenthell’s effects, for she had barely felt like smiling over the past few days.
“I’ll admit they have their uses,” Rais said. “Never have I felt so unwelcome. Not even in Hellea.”
“I think we’ll have even more use for them before we leave Devrilinum,” Cassia said. “The more I see of this town, the less I believe we will find anything of use here.”
Rais sobered again, though his stride did not falter. “You feel it too.”
“I knew it before,” she reminded him. “But the broken things in the road; they were not abandoned, they were thrown there. Cast there by whatever swept the town clean of life. I think if anything does remain in the markets, it will not be edible.”
“A lure, then,” Rais said. “A snare to trap a whole army.”
“But one that we must trigger, just as you said.”
This time the prince’s lips twitched upwards, but Cassia would never have described his expression as a smile. He rolled his shoulders. “What Kolus builds, Peleanna will whittle away. And what Peleanna heralds in, Kolus will shield us from.”
Cassia liked that phrase. She stored it in her mind, alongside her stories.
“In other words,” Rais continued, “the world is wind and shit.”
She stared at him for a moment, shocked by his sudden profanity, and then burst helplessly into laughter.
It was as if the men who constructed the frames of the stalls that usually sat within Devrilinum’s market square had gone mad halfway through the morning’s task, electing to smash all manner of poles, planking and wooden boxes into pieces. Where the frames had not been splintered beyond usefulness, their components had been gathered together and stacked in the most ugly and unstable manner Cassia could imagine. A blind madman’s interpretation of a tree he had never seen; that was the only way she could think to describe it. It sat in the centre of the square, a monstrosity that looked fit to collapse if anybody breathed hard upon it.
“Sweet gods save us all,” Cassia heard one of Teon’s men mutter.
She heard the structure creak as she stepped gingerly around the edge of the square, aware that she should take care with her footing, yet unable to tear her gaze away from the thing.
“If you needed any other proof that the curse wards should not be broken . . .” she said, as loud as she dared.
Rais grunted. “I can feel that thing’s hostility from here. I don’t think I will come any closer.”
Cassia pointed to one of the shopfronts. Unlike the other buildings they had seen so far, this one was still closed up, the wooden shutter latched from the inside. “The wool merchants gathered here. And at the next one along, too. I think there’s a small workshop at the back. There might be some blankets inside.”
“And food?” Teon asked. He was conspicuously not looking at the curse-built thing that reared up over him, though he had not turned his back upon it either.
She indicated the far side of the square. “Over there, I think.”
Some of the shutters on that side hung open, the still darkness lurking behind them. Teon nodded to two of his men and they began to pick their way around the edge of the square, swords held ready and empty sacks folded into their belts.
“Carefully, Teon,” Rais said. “This is no game.”
The young commander merely nodded, balanced on the balls of his feet. Another gesture, and the men who accompanied him paused to duck into a small side street for a moment. One emerged empty-handed, the other carried a rough wooden tray half-filled with dirt-covered root vegetables. Even at this distance Cassia could see the roots were grey and unappetising.
With that small success, more of the soldiers began to cross the square, all casting nervous glances at the unearthly structure that reached out towards them. Cassia bit her lip, wondering whether to call them back. Somehow she thought they would not listen to her.
The wooden tray had been passed back to Rais. He picked over its contents and spat onto the ground. “If this is any indication, then what small amounts we do carry from Devrilinum will hardly affect the column’s hunger,” he said.
Cassia had already guessed as much. She called for a shieldman and ordered it to force the wool merchant’s shutters anyway, more in hope than expectation. As it pulled the boards effortlessly away, she lit her second brand from the sputtering remains of the first and directed the light into the shop.
Whole fleeces hung on the racks like decayed skin, ragged and disintegrating as the light touched them. Carded and spun balls of wool lay on the floor as though they were cracked eggs. The door to the merchant’s workshop hung by a single hinge, amorphous darkness swirling behind it.
Cassia stared into that darkness, entranced by the way it seemed to change as the brand flickered, almost as if it was actually moving . . .
. . . and the shieldman grabbed her shoulder and wrenched her away so suddenly it felt like her arm had been torn from its socket. At the same moment there was a sharp crack from behind her, and a high-pitched shout of alarm and fear from further around the square.
As she staggered, propelled back and to one side by the shieldman, she heard Rais curse in hard Galliarcan. At the corner of her vision she saw the splintered limbs of the unnatural tree whip through the air, wood spinning out violently from the mass to attack soldiers and shieldmen alike.
Cassia pulled away from the shieldman’s grip, ducked, and skidded across the square with the lit brand held high. She felt splinters and stones hit the ground at her feet. One struck her arm, hard enough to leave a bruise.
“A trap, you said!” Rais shouted as she reached his side. Half a dozen shieldmen were moving to form a protective ring around her, and she hoped they would protect Rais as well. “Well, consider it sprung!”
Shutters burst open all around the square, and tendrils of mist snaked out from them, and from every path that led into the market. The limbs of the tree lashed at the soldiers who had found themselves stranded in the open space, pinning them between it and the thick mists that had lain in wait for them. Soldiers and shieldmen alike raised their weapons, all thoughts of foraging abandoned.
Cassia’s heart beat cold blood through her veins. It was the same as at Karakhel, she thought. Except that this time the men she commanded would only die once.
No – it would not be that easy. She would not let it be that easy. She was the Heir to the North, and Rais was a prince of Galliarca. If she was to fail, it would not be because she had been baited by the lure of withered vegetables and rotten wool. She knew how to fight this creature, whatever it might name itself.
She thrust the lit brand at Rais. “Fire the buildings,” she told him. “Light every damned torch and set fire to the lot.”
He had no choice but to take it. As he did so, she launched back up to her feet, ducking under
the arm of the nearest shieldman, and drew Pelicos’s sword.
Mist solidified near her shoulder. She shifted her weight, spun, and sliced across it with the blade, and the tendril dissipated as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Oh, that’s right,” she told the air, letting a fierce grin onto her face. “You know this weapon. You know what I am.”
Behind her Rais shouted, but she paid him no mind. Her attention was fixed on the terrors the High King had left to defeat her, and on the vague silhouettes of the soldiers engaged in their own struggle for survival on the far side of the square. Mist billowed down over the rooftops, as though it had been pent up, condensed even, in the narrow alleys and small back yards of Devrilinum. Free at last, like dogs off the leash, it eddied across the square despite the complete lack of a breeze.
Something more solid leaped out at her. Cassia ducked aside, pierced another crawling tendril of mist, and realised that the mockery of a tree was driving its own twisted limbs towards her. She parried it – once, twice, then slid quickly away from it before the thing could bring another spar into play against her.
A bloom of light danced across the corner of her vision. It was Rais, torch in one hand, sword in the other, twisting between the life-sucking mists that converged on him. Every movement was designed to take him closer to the next shieldman, to set light to the brands it carried. Behind him, three already stood with burning torches in their upraised hands.
“Burn Devrilinum!” Cassia shouted again. “Burn the town!”
She had no time to see how they responded. Another section of scaffolding detached itself from the towering monstrosity before her, and she had to hurl herself away before it hit her. If she had not practised the forms Meredith had taught her, she would most likely be dead already.
