He held Myrrhini close, allowing her lips to find his. Their breath mingled as her body moulded itself to his. This was a mistake, but she felt so good beside him. The simple, raw pleasure of a female body pressed against him.
It would end badly. It had to.
Everybody dies sometime.
14
It was not difficult for Slave to fall to the back of the column as it marched towards the Wall. The Tulugma were focused, purposeful and self-important. They had a mission; they would probably die and they knew it. Slave had spent enough time with Keshik to know of his odd fascination with a ‘worthy’ death at the hands of a ‘worthy’ opponent. He guessed it was not uncommon among the Tulugma. These fighters were marching to their deaths with anticipation, even excitement.
Beside him, Myrrhini walked with a spring in her step. She walked close to him, a little too close for his liking. She kept touching him, attempting to hold his hand as they walked. With her so close, he could not be confident of being able to react fast enough should an attack come from her side, but as that was where the Tulugma army was, he would have time to push her away.
At the main gate Ozcollo went right, making for what looked like a solid slab of rock. When he reached it, however, he kept walking. It shimmered, not unlike how the shapeshifters did, and vanished, revealing a wide, steep stairway. It wound its way up the side of the Wall, vanishing around a curve.
‘That way,’ Ozcollo said, pointing up. ‘Follow it all the way. There are observation holes all along it, so you will be watched. Not,’ he added with a mocking chuckle, ‘that there is anywhere to go up there.’
‘And this will take us all the way over?’ Maida asked, staring up.
‘I think so, but no one has used it in living memory.’
Keshik snarled at Ozcollo, but waved the Tulugma forward onto the stairway. Slave, with a hood up over his face, walked beside Myrrhini near the back of the column, controlling his breathing. He knew what awaited him — great height, wind, a horrifying vista of openness reaching far below to the brown raging river and east to the mountains. He would need every trace of control, every hint of strength to keep the panic at bay.
Myrrhini rested her hand on his arm. ‘I can help,’ she whispered.
Slave shook off her hand. There was nothing she could do. He had to face this. She grabbed his arm again. His instinctive response was to use his other hand to grab hers, reverse the grip and twist her arm back, forcing her to her knees from where he could slam the heel of his left hand into her throat, killing her in a move so fast she would not see it coming. His move was nearly halfway done when he caught the instinct and released her hand. He was about to snarl a warning at her when her eyes flared brilliant red. She spat a word in the ancient language of sorcerers and the whole world shifted.
In a heartbeat, Slave was wrapped in flame. Brilliant reds, yellows and flickers of blue enveloped him, blinding him, sending him screaming, falling, tumbling out of control. Agony ripped through his body, tearing at his mind, battering at every sense.
Is this death? Finally, my old friend, is it time?
As suddenly as it took him, the agony, the flame, the coruscating colour, vanished. He stood, unharmed and alone. In his hand, his Claw glinted in the gentle glow of Grada as her soft cool light filtered through a canopy of rich foliage above him.
Death? Could this be?
A groan sounded nearby. Slave dropped into a crouch, once more becoming aware of his surroundings. He was in a forest. Beneath his feet was a dense layer of moist leaf litter; large trees rose all around him, their massive, exposed roots giving the forest floor a sculpted feel. Nothing was flat or smooth, everywhere was rounded, uneven. Moss grew on the boles of the ancient trees, vines hung down from the overhead branches. Animals scuttled through the ages-old detritus on the ground or scrabbled through the trees above, while birds called to each other overhead.
I know this place.
Another groan.
Myrrhini.
She was lying face down in a pit beyond a large tree. The remnants of a campsite were scattered around the pit. Slave recognised both the pit and the camp. It was the very pit he had left Keshik in, so long ago when he had been captured by Guaman just before they had taken control of the Wall.
That she had brought them here was not at issue. The question was: how? Both how she had done it and how she had known about this place.
Slave knelt at the edge of the pit and reached down. He grabbed Myrrhini’s shoulder and turned her over.
‘That hurts,’ Myrrhini muttered.
‘What hurts?’
‘Everything.’
She took hold of Slave’s hand to clamber out of the pit. She was covered in mud and other, less readily identifiable, brown slime. Her eyes no longer burned as brightly. The flames deep within were still there, but the raging fires were stilled.
‘How did you do that?’ Slave asked.
‘I don’t know, but I have done it before, and I just knew I could again.’
‘Why here?’
‘It was in your past, and in your future.’
‘Future?’
‘Now, actually,’ Myrrhini admitted.
Slave went cold. Every sense tingled. He was being watched. They were being watched. In the still forest air, he could smell the rank stench of unwashed men — and women.
They were no longer being quiet, or still.
With a shock, Slave realised they had been sleeping and had just been awakened by his and Myrrhini’s sudden arrival here. He stilled his mind, his body, to focus on the watchers.
There were twenty.
All human, armed but not armoured, they had the stink of old clothes, not metal or leather, and their weapons did not rattle or slither out of scabbards. These people carried their weapons in preference to anything else.
They were advancing on Slave and Myrrhini without stealth or attempt at concealment of any kind. He knew who they had to be.
He drew out his Claw and turned to face them.
They were coming at him quickly, rusty weapons, filthy clothes, matted hair, scarred faces, surging in an untidy mass over the exposed roots and leaf-covered forest floor. At the sight of his own scarred face, glowing silver eye and upraised Warrior’s Claw, they gave a concerted gasp and slid, staggered, lurched to a halt.
‘Beq,’ one ragged voice rasped.
As he held the Claw aloft, staring down at the stinking, cowering few who crouched animal-like in the mud, a rage, a surging wave of power flooded through him, leaving him almost bursting with emotion. ‘I am your Beq,’ Slave thundered. ‘You will obey me in everything.’
A low growl of assent rippled through the grovellers at his feet.
‘The great City of the Wall is an affront to me. It must fall. You are to bring it down. Attack! Now!’ He gestured with his Claw in the general direction of the Wall. As one, the pathetic collection of humanity screamed and ran towards the Wall.
Slave lowered his Claw — No, he realised, not my Claw, the Revenant’s Claw. The weapon of the thing I released, the thing my people summoned to this world to destroy the Mertians.
The thing whose army I just suborned. The thing I have just betrayed.
A thrill of joy shook him; a pleasure beneath happiness, beneath rational thought, shuddered through him.
‘I defy you!’ he roared. ‘And I will destroy you!’
‘I am with you, Slave of Sondelle,’ Myrrhini hissed.
At his name, Slave spun to face her. His eye burst into blinding silver brilliance, matched by her own burning red gaze, and together they ran northeast.
Together they hunted.
The last pureblood Mertian Seer ran with the last pureblood Scaren Beq until she dropped. Her feet and legs were ripped and bleeding from the forest, her hands numb from forcing aside the grabbing branches that sought to slow her, her face bruised as she lay in the mud. Standing over her, standing guard against their shared enemy, the Beq awaited the dawn when
they could again hunt, the inexplicable joy fading with Grada’s setting.
As the light of the dawn filtered through the canopy, Myrrhini stirred. The madness of the night left her hollow and weak.
‘What did we do?’ she whispered.
Slave crouched beside her, spinning the Claw in his hand. ‘The madness of the Revenant,’ he said. ‘I had wondered how it could replenish its army when it appears bent on nothing but destruction.’ He lifted the Warrior’s Claw to allow it to glint in the sunrise. ‘Its madness spreads from person to person, infecting all it comes in contact with.’
‘How can you defeat something like that?’
‘With our own.’
‘Our own?’
Slave shifted the Claw so that it reflected sunlight into Myrrhini’s eyes. ‘With this I attack armies. With those eyes, you can See where they are. Together, we are the ancient warriors come back to the world.’ He gave a low, animal growl. ‘That is insane.’
‘Then that is what we will do,’ Myrrhini added. ‘And those you sent to the Wall yesterday? What will become of them?’
‘I sent them to Keshik. He has six hundred Tulugma at his back. I sent them to their deaths.’ His growl shifted to a laugh redolent with latent mania. ‘It’s twenty I don’t have to kill later.’
Myrrhini rose stiffly from the mud. She turned her face northeast. ‘They are there,’ she said, pointing.
‘And Keshik?’
Myrrhini turned to point southwest. ‘They are following.’ She stared at Slave with her burning eyes. ‘And yesterday? What was that?’
‘That was madness,’ Slave assured her. ‘The madness of the Revenant. We were affected.’
Myrrhini lowered her head as though accepting this, but Slave knew it was more. He remembered the surge of savage joy at having the lives of those cowering before him in his hand. With a word, he knew he could have ordered them to fall upon each other in an orgy of destruction. He could have ordered them to run and throw themselves into the Great River of Kings, or anything else that came to his mind, and they would have done it. For that moment their lives were his and he felt power. Rich, intoxicating power. Power that would brook no interference, no hindrance, no reversal. For a heartbeat, he knew the power of the Revenant. In that moment, he knew. He knew it all.
Through the uncounted days that followed, they moved slower and with more care. Everywhere there were signs of others passing the same way. Occasionally they found a body that had died where it fell, exhausted by madness, its face marred by twin scars, deep and straight, that ran from just below the hairline above the left eyebrow down across the face to end at the right-hand corner of the mouth, cutting straight through the left eye and across the bridge of the nose. Myrrhini always shuddered and looked away whenever she saw the scars.
‘They do this to themselves?’ she asked.
‘To look like their Beq, yes.’
They now moved quickly, but with care, through the forest of southern Tusemo, tracking the path of the Great River of Kings. Myrrhini kept track of both the army of the Revenant ahead as it surged along the river, and the dogged progress of Keshik’s troop behind them. Whenever they came across a village or small town, they found the same thing: everyone dead, every building levelled, all food eaten and the smoke from wanton destruction writhing upward through the trees above. Amid the wreckage, they found the bodies of the mad, the self-wounded followers of the Revenant — too few of them. Slave remembered the power, saw his followers, and forced the memory deep.
In the moment when Slave had been touched by the madness of the Revenant’s army, he had seen the plan. The Mertians, unlike the Scarens, had been scattered more than utterly destroyed. There were remnants of Mertians all across the north of the world, underpinning the societies of both C’sobra and Lac’u. The wanderers who gathered the mangase — Kirri’s people — were Mertian. The Revenant’s sole aim was the utter destruction of every hint of the Mertian race. And he, the last Scaren Beq, was to be a part of that, but he, Slave, had his own ideas. Slave wondered how many people knew the great Tulugma was Mertian, and that was why the Revenant had struck eastward after being released from its prison.
The traces of the army were clearer here than they had been for some time. Slave crouched beside a dead body and touched it — dead not more than a few days. No matter how insane or how driven an army, two people can always move faster. They were gaining on the Revenant.
‘How far away is Keshik?’
Myrrhini turned her eyes to look west. ‘Two days.’
‘Confront chaos with discipline,’ Slave muttered. ‘Tatya, Alyosha, I need you.’
The barin and the spurre shimmered into their primary forms close by; they had been obscured in their other forms but now they bulked large.
‘Do you know where Keshik’s army is?’ Myrrhini asked.
The barin growled in assent.
‘Could you bring them here?’ Slave asked. Neither shapeshifter bothered answering before bounding away west.
‘How did you know they were there?’ Myrrhini asked.
‘They have been tracking us ever since you shifted us over the Wall. It took them a few days but Alyosha is a wily old warrior.’
‘But how did you know they were there?’ Myrrhini persisted.
‘I know when I am being followed.’
‘How?’
‘Concentration.’
‘We should wait here for Keshik,’ Myrrhini suggested.
Slave looked around the ruined town. Not one wall was left standing, not a single structure remained intact, not even dog kennels. Of some buildings, all that was left was a smouldering pile of blackened wood. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere, already starting to stink in the sun.
‘Why?’ he asked.
Myrrhini walked slowly away from him, eyes down, staring intently at the ground. After about ten paces, she stopped and kicked at the dirt.
‘Here,’ she said.
Slave squatted beside her. He scraped at the earth to reveal a wooden panel buried nearly a handspan down. With mounting curiosity, he dug until it was completely uncovered, revealing a heavy iron ring and solid hinges. Slave heaved at the ring, pulling the door open. The stench of death reached out for him. He peered down into the darkness, making out a set of stairs. The dead body was just a few steps in. She was lying face down with a savage axe wound in her back, as if she had just managed to get into shelter before succumbing to her injury.
To his surprise, Myrrhini eased past him to make her way down the stairs. She stepped gingerly past the dead woman. Slave followed, curious as to what she had Seen, for surely she had a reason for what she was doing. After a few steps, Myrrhini paused and stooped, then straightened up holding a bloodied axe that she hefted over her shoulder before continuing.
The stairs took a turn to the left, changing as they did so from old and rough to ancient and skilfully constructed. The light faded quickly around the corner, plunging them into a world of utter black, of echoing silence, of subtle smells and air movements.
Into Slave’s world.
With the vanishing of the empty sky above also went the ever-present edge of discomfort. Slave breathed the easiest he had since leaving the Wall. The comforting closeness of the stone above him, the walls around him, the rock beneath his feet all worked to welcome him home.
It was as if his senses came to life. He could hear Myrrhini breathing, the scrape of the grit beneath his feet, the whisper of air as they moved through. The scent of current decay mingled with that of ancient death. This was a dark and evil place, a place where the rank skills of the necromancers had been practised. Slave reached out his hand to the wall, feeling beneath his fingers the sigils he remembered so well from his master’s work room. A thrill of naked fear ran through him, but here, underground, in the dark, such fear was his friend. It would keep him alert, focused, alive. He rested his other hand on Myrrhini’s shoulder, making her hesitate, allowing him to lean in to speak into her ear.
<
br /> ‘Care,’ he whispered.
Myrrhini gave no indication that she had heard, but Slave heard her breathing quicken slightly. She understood. Slave moved silently ahead of her as he released her shoulder. She rested her free hand on his back as she followed him down the stairs.
Twenty-four steps down there was a landing, two paces across, with two more stairways heading down from it. The one to the left held dead air, it led nowhere, while the one to the right held the scent of water and air that moved slightly. A stream?
Slave went right.
The stairs were shallower and felt smoother beneath his feet. More use? Older? Better made? Slave crouched to run his finger over the stone. Older and better made than the ones above. They were also wider. Slave rose, rested his hand once more on the wall and continued down. The scent of water grew steadily, and with it came the sound of dripping.
For a moment, Slave recalled the dripping he heard just before breaking out of his cell into the labyrinth beneath Vogel. In the blackness, he allowed himself a grim smile. It was doubtful he would discover anything here like he did there.
But what was down here?
Myrrhini’s hand resting on his shoulder tightened suddenly.
‘There,’ she whispered. ‘Ahead, to the left.’
Slave looked up, following her directions to see a momentary flicker of blue high on the left wall. It was gone as quickly as it appeared, but it left a lingering impression in his eyes. He recognised the shape as another necromantic sigil — one with dark, arcane power. It was one Sondelle had used on occasion to punish both Slave and the people he brought in to train him. Slave’s arm tingled in remembered pain.
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