by Ian Irvine
She was alone again.
Some of the masonry had been toppled by the quake but Rannilt spied a dry hole between the angle of two standing walls and the tumbled, mossy blocks of stone in front. She crept into the hole, into the darkest, tightest corner she could find, and wrapped her coat around her. It reminded her of hiding from the bully girls in Cython.
Having been hungry all her life as a slave, she pilfered food whenever she got the chance, and one of her coat pockets was full of stale bread and hard cheese. She ate a small portion of each, curled up and slept. That was another of her slave-girl skills. She could sleep anywhere.
Later on she heard distant shouting and the sound of thousands of people running like a herd, in panic. She did not look out. People did terrible things in war. If the enemy caught her, they might kill her like a rat, just for fun. Rannilt scrunched herself into an even smaller ball and did not make a sound.
Sometime after dark she was woken by a whimpering sound, though it was not the kind of whimper an injured dog made. This was a far bigger creature and it was badly hurt; it was dragging itself across the ground.
She dared not leave her hiding place, but she had to know what it was. She screwed her eyes shut, pressed her fingertips to the sides of her head and tried to sense the creature with her golden magery, that strange gift she had never understood. Her fingertips tingled and a momentary gleam illuminated her hidey hole, but she sensed nothing. Her gift had never worked properly since that terrible time in Lyf’s caverns, when he had drawn power out of her and nearly killed her.
Then, suddenly, Rannilt saw the creature in her mind’s eye: a shifter, but not a fierce one. It was crawling between a cluster of hovels, pulling itself along with one arm, with broken chains scraping and clanking behind it. Its other arm was bent at an odd angle, badly broken, and her heart went out to the poor, suffering creature.
She did not know where it was, though the nearest hovels had been at least a quarter of a mile away. The shifter looked around—a flash of yellow eyes—clawed at the ground and lurched through the rubble into a partly collapsed hovel. It was dark inside and she saw nothing save various still shapes on the floor, dead men and women.
The shifter shifted to a huge cat-like creature—a caitsthe, seven feet of deadly muscle. It crept to the nearest body and she heard a dreadful rending and gulping until a quarter of the body was gone. The shifter settled, closed its eyes. She must have slept as well, for when she next looked it was in man form again.
He sat up awkwardly, cradling his broken arm and wincing, which was odd—shifting usually healed injuries. There must be something badly wrong with him. The chains rattled and he looked around. She could just make out the shapes on the floor, two dead men and a dead woman, further off.
The shifter looked at the first man, who was partly eaten. He stiffened, let out a howl of uttermost torment, then came to his knees and threw up violently. He looked around, wild-eyed, and she saw that it was Tobry. He was alive! His chains must have broken as the tree fell.
Rannilt could read the self-disgust in his eyes, the horrified real-isation that he, once a decent and honourable man, had sunk so low that he had been feeding on the dead. His hands closed around his throat as if trying to choke himself to death. He squeezed for at least a minute, then his hands relaxed and he toppled over and lay there, weeping.
“You poor thing!” she whispered. “Stay there. I’m comin’.”
She crept out and stood up. She was sniffing the foggy air as if she could scent him out when Glynnie said, “There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
She reached out to take Rannilt’s hand, and all Rannilt could see was another slave master ordering her around, trying to stop her from doing what she wanted more than anything in the world.
She sprang at Glynnie, slapping and scratching at her in a frenzy.
“What’s the matter? Rannilt, it’s me! You’re safe now.”
Rannilt clawed at Glynnie’s face, shoved her over and ran blindly into the fog.
“I can heal you,” she cried. “I can, I can!”
CHAPTER 4
“Where the hell is Rufuss?” said Axil Grandys, stalking back and forth dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. “He should have brought Tali hours ago. I need that damned pearl.”
“You know how he hungers for blood and pain,” said Lirriam. “He’s probably battered her to death. I can’t think why you sent him.”
“He does what he’s told. He won’t dare touch her…” Grandys’ voice faded.
“He’s been obedient so far. But he’s getting worse—even you must have noticed that. One day soon, perhaps even today, he’ll snap.”
They were on the northern rim of Red Mesa, several miles south of the Plain of Reffering. Lirriam was trying to provoke him, as usual, and he wasn’t biting. Grandys looked down at the plain three hundred feet below, where his army was carrying out formation manoeuvres, ten thousand pureblood Herovians marching as one in the chilling Heroes’ strut. It lifted his spirits.
He paced more vigorously, pieces of red stone crumbling off the rim underfoot. Grandys was a huge, fleshy man with an enormous bloated head, an arching nose like the prow of a ship and hands the size of pumpkin leaves. His skin was covered in armour of precious black opal, a legacy of the millennia the Five Heroes had spent petrified by Lyf’s curse—though the opal had cracked off here and there, revealing a venous, tomato-coloured complexion. His arching prow of a nose was bare of armour, crooked and flattened at the end, as if it had been smashed with a heavy object.
Lirriam could not have been more different. She was not tall, but buxom in the extreme, with creamy skin, no armour save for her hypnotic voice, and shimmering opaline hair down to her shoulders.
“ ’Scope!” snapped Grandys, holding out his hand.
Behind him, a fresh-faced soldier searched frantically in the gear stacked against a low, rocky bluff. He lifted a pair of saddlebags, fumbled at the straps, felt inside and extracted a brass telescope case.
“ ’Scope!” roared Grandys.
With a shaking hand, the soldier jerked the telescope out of the case, dropped it, and there came the crash of breaking glass. The other soldiers froze. Even Lirriam stiffened.
The young soldier let out a muffled sob. His dark hair was standing up. He picked up the broken telescope and crept across to Grandys, holding it out but looking away, unable to meet Grandys’ eyes.
“Put it down,” said Grandys.
The soldier laid the telescope beside Grandys. Grandys reached out slowly, clenched his fist in the soldier’s shirt and lifted him off his feet. Grandys swung around until his arm extended out over the precipice. His arm was steady; he held the soldier over the three hundred-foot drop effortlessly.
“I’m sorry,” the soldier sobbed. “Please, Lord Grandys, don’t…”
“Why am I punishing you?” Grandys said pleasantly.
“Because I was slow,” the soldier gabbled. “And careless. Because I broke your telescope.”
“Anyone can make a mistake,” said Grandys. “I, myself, often make mistakes. For instance, when I took you into my army.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t punish a man for making one or two mistakes. But what I can never tolerate is a Herovian who begs, or whines, or weeps! That’s why I’m going to punish you, Private Greller.”
The six guards on the other side of the rock platform were quite still, staring at Grandys.
“Let him be, Grandys,” Lirriam said softly.
“The men have to know what I stand for. And what I can never tolerate.”
“They know all too well.”
“Greller doesn’t. Clearly the lesson has to be reinforced.”
“Please, please don’t hurt me,” wept Greller.
“See,” said Grandys. “He still hasn’t learned the lesson.”
He opened his hand. Greller’s cry trailed off as he fell out of sight then, after t
hree or four seconds, it stopped abruptly.
Lirriam let out her breath in a hiss. “You’re a fool, Grandys. You’ll never lead us to the Promised Realm.”
“Are you challenging me?” he said incredulously.
“Not at the moment.”
He snorted. “You don’t have what it takes.”
Grandys drew his enchanted sword, Maloch, touched it to the telescope, and the fragments of broken glass drew together to re-form intact lenses. He extended the tubes, put his eye to the ocular and scanned the enemy formations to the north.
“What a miserable lot they are,” he said. “Hardly worth killing.”
“They outnumber us five to one,” said Lirriam.
Grandys swept the ’scope over Lyf’s horde, which made a dark shadow across the undulating ground between Lake Bunt and the vast Lake Fumerous. How he hungered for a bloody victory. “I’ll defeat them the way I’ve defeated everyone else.”
“Except Rixium.”
The tomato colour ripened. “I’m going to pull him limb from limb with these bare hands.” He brandished his meaty paws in her face.
Lirriam wrinkled her nose and stepped backwards. “We Five Heroes will beat him,” she said with heavy emphasis. “Not you alone. Though I’ll concede you have some skill on the battlefield.”
“One day you’ll provoke me too far,” he growled. “With Maloch in my hand, I’m invincible. No weapon ever forged can beat it in combat; no steel can break its tempered titane blade.”
She yawned. “But how good are you without it and its protective enchantment? How good are you in a fair fight?”
“I’m the greatest warrior that ever walked this land—”
“Not to mention the most bombastic. If you’re so great, why do you need the master pearl?”
He restrained an angry retort. She knew the answer as well as he did but her baiting was more irritating than usual.
“Magery is dwindling, as everything in this miserable land crumbles and fails. The sooner we cast the Three Spells and clean out its pestilential peoples, the better.”
A man and a woman appeared from the other side of the rocky bluff. “I was starting to think that all you cared about was war,” said Yulia, the third of the Five Heroes. “That you’d lost sight of the reason we came to this land in the first place.”
She was a handspan taller than Lirriam but slender, with black hair, golden skin and wide, anguished eyes. The only opaline parts of her were her nails. Behind her stood the fourth Hero, Syrten, a hulking, golem-like figure half a head shorter than Grandys but a full foot wider. His skin was so thickly encrusted with coarse opal armour that his massive thighs rasped like millstones as he moved.
“War is all Grandys cares about,” said Lirriam, displaying her small white teeth. “He needs to prove himself over and again. What inadequacy is he trying to make up for, do you think?”
Grandys swung around, one fist clenched, though he did not raise it. “We can do nothing about the Promised Realm until we’ve beaten Lyf,” he said to Yulia.
“We should send for the Immortal Text,” said Yulia.
“It’s safer where it is until we’re ready to cast the Three Spells,” said Grandys.
Lirriam, unaccountably for such a strong woman, shivered. “I’m having second thoughts about using such world-shaking magery. What if the spells go wrong? They might not transform Hight-spall—they could end it.”
“By the time I have the power to use the spells,” said Grandys, “I’ll know how to use them properly.”
“We’ve waited so long.” There was a plaintive note in Yulia’s voice. “When will we have the power, Grandys?”
“After I’ve taken king-magery, and I can’t do that until I’ve got the master pearl. It’ll take all five ebony pearls to raise king-magery from its hiding place.” He looked Yulia in the eye. “Once I have it, I’ll create the Promised Realm we so richly deserve.”
“When?” persisted Yulia. “Two thousand years ago we were entrusted with the sacred task and it’s further away than ever.”
“After I’ve crushed Rix and cut him to pieces.”
“But the Promised Realm was supposed to be the beginning, not the end. Our new beginning.”
“Life is glorious. We don’t need—”
“All you think about is ruin, Grandys. I want to create life, not destroy it.”
He gaped. “You want children?”
“What else is life for?”
“It’s for glory!” cried Grandys, raising Maloch high. “And for grinding your enemies into the dust.”
“Syrten and I think—”
“Tell us what your devoted slave thinks,” Grandys sneered.
“Syrten is a brave and fearless warrior,” Yulia said stiffly.
“Because he’s too thick-skinned to feel pain, too dumb to know fear. Unlike you, Yulia. You hang back in battle like a craven, emotional woman.”
Lirriam’s smile vanished. “Long before we stepped ashore from the First Fleet, Grandys, we Five swore a pact on Incarnate. Each for all, all for each—forever. Are you breaking the pact?”
An involuntary shiver ran through him. He stroked Maloch’s worn blade, then thrust it back in its sheath.
“Are you defending Yulia’s frailty?” said Grandys. “The Five Heroes have never tolerated weakness.”
“You were defeated by a dead-handed man,” Lirriam said coldly. “Then a slip of a girl not half your size beat you up, smashed your ugly nose and rescued Rixium. Maybe I should crush you and lead the Five Heroes myself.”
“But you’re just a woman!” he said incredulously.
Lirriam’s face set granite-hard, then went curiously, icily blank. As she turned away, Grandys’ mocking laughter echoed off the red cliff behind her.
He tried to ignore the shock in Syrten’s eyes, the fear in Yulia’s. Yulia blinked and it was gone, then she said quietly, “That wasn’t a good idea, Grandys.”
“Why not?” He thrust his opal jaw at her.
“No man can even hold Incarnate in a bare hand… but it’s said the right woman can wake it from its long sleep.”
“The stone has been dead for twelve thousand years. I’m not afraid of it waking.”
“You should be—it’s the most perilous device ever created. If Incarnate should wake, and fall into the wrong hands, nothing will ever be the same again.”
CHAPTER 5
Fear was an everyday emotion in the life of a slave.
So it had been for Tali in Cython, and often since her escape. Fear of Overseer Banj, a decent but rigid Cythonian who had beheaded her friend, Mia. Fear of the vicious guard, Orlyk, who had pursued Tali relentlessly across the Seethings, and caught her twice. Fear of the chancellor, who had imprisoned her in Fortress Rutherin so he could have her milked of her healing blood. Fear of Lyf, and his foul shifter creation the facinore, and the decrepit sorcerer Deroe who had tried to cut the master pearl out of her, and of so many others along the path to now.
Yet nothing life had shown Tali so far had prepared her for the blood-freezing terror she felt when Rufuss grabbed her.
After separating from Rix she had followed Rannilt’s tracks through the dry grass. The child had bolted west after the quake, though after a quarter of an hour Tali had lost her footmarks. A sudden pang struck her and she stopped. Tobry! Gone!
It had been the best possible end, far better than putting him down like a mad dog. But it hurt. It hurt desperately.
She had been walking in widening spirals for a good while, casting around for Rannilt’s tracks, when Rufuss stepped out from behind a tree stump, clamped an elongated hand around her skull and jerked her off her feet.
Tali screamed, “Rix?” Though only once.
Rufuss slammed his other hand across her face from ear to ear and squeezed so hard that she tasted blood. He was a very tall man with disproportionately long legs and extraordinarily narrow feet and hands. He pressed a fingertip to her forehead. She felt the sting of magery
and caught a whiff of something foul—like a long-dead animal—and her gift retreated beyond her reach. All Five Heroes were masters of magery, while she was still a novice, and she had no idea how to get her gift back.
“Rix?” she screeched again when Rufuss moved his hand.
She saw a momentary unease in his eyes; he was afraid of Rix. She tried to bite Rufuss. His fingernails dug in, holding her jaw shut.
“He didn’t hear,” said Rufuss, bestowing a ghastly black-opal smile on her. “He’s already gone over the hill.”
Nonetheless, he dragged her behind the stump and pressed an iron-hard knee so firmly against her breastbone that Tali could scarcely draw breath. Rufuss kept low for several minutes, checking carefully around the side of the stump, then withdrew his knee.
He knocked her onto her back and put his boot in the middle of her chest. His black eyes raked her, settling everywhere but on her own eyes. He bound her hand and foot, heaved her over his shoulder and set off towards the south at a fast pace, keeping to the bottoms of valleys and following the paths of streams where there was the best cover. After half an hour, when he must have covered several miles, he pushed into the centre of a thicket, threw her down again and rested his foot on her throat.
In a voice that trembled with rage, he said, “You’re the prettiest woman I’ve seen since I was turned back from stone to man.” His emphasis made the word prettiest seem offensive.
She did not reply. She could barely breathe. What was he going to do to her?
He kicked her in the ribs, hard enough to hurt. “Where are your manners? I paid you a compliment.”
“No—” she wheezed, “no—compliment.”
He kicked her again in the same place.
“You’d better be nice to me. If you’re rude, I’ll punish you.”
She had no intention of being nice to him; it simply wasn’t in her. Besides, she could tell he was a coward as well as a bully and her only hope was to take him on. “You’re full of hate, Rufuss. You hate the whole world.”