by Tim Stead
“Mordo killed him,” Pascha said. “He might as well have signed the corpse. Nobody else but me had access to the vault, so the body being found there is conclusive. As to why… Boragis may have discovered that he killed Josetin, but that merely replaces one unknown with another.”
“I saw Mordo yesterday,” Callista admitted.
“Yesterday? When?”
“It was early in the morning before I came to you. He was in the lesser hall downstairs. He asked a favour of me.”
“Tell me.”
Callista related the tale of the broken tile and her recreation of it, and Pascha frowned at that.
“That was beyond you,” she said. “You could have harmed yourself, even died. You must be more careful.”
“It seemed a harmless request,” Callista said. “And I succeeded.”
Pascha sat back in her chair, sipped at a cup of tea, but put it down again at once. Cold, Callista guessed.
“It seems trivial,” she agreed. “But when you know that Boragis was already dead when Mordo spoke to you it gains a new significance.”
“Already dead?”
“Aye, the night before, or so they tell me. Why would he bother to have a tile remade if he already knew he was going to run?”
“I cannot imagine why.”
Pascha stood up. “We’ll investigate it ourselves,” she said. “Would you know these tiles again if you saw them?”
“Of course.”
“Come, then.”
They walked down the stairs from Pascha’s home to the great hall and on into the lesser hall, which was just as Callista remembered it. She saw the tiles at once – they had been fitted either side of the door, embedded in the wall.
“These,” she said, pointing. “Mordo had one, and I copied it to make the other.”
Pascha crouched next to one of the tiles. She ran a finger over its intricate design. “A pretty piece of work, but nothing special about it.” She shifted across the door to the other tile and examined that, too. “You say you copied one tile to make the other. How?”
“I touched one and willed a twin into existence, left hand to right hand.”
“And there was no problem?”
“Not in the work, but it drained me. I was tired afterwards.”
“It’s a wonder you were alive,” Pascha said. She shifted back to the first tile, ran a finger down the line of a road etched into the clay. “Look at this,” she said.
Callista crouched beside her. Pascha was pointing to a feature on the clay image, a bush by the road. It was no more than an inch high, but the craftsman who had made it had managed to pack detail into the tiny picture.
“You see the leaves,” Pascha said. “Out of scale, of course, but you see that there are five down the left side.”
Five there were: tiny ovals cut then baked into the clay. Callista wondered what tool the man had used to cut them so fine.
“Now over here. The wonder, of course, is that for all their skill such men cannot duplicate their work. There are always small aberrations. Look.”
Callista looked. She found the same bush by the same clay road and looked at it. Six. There were six leaves.
“That’s not possible,” she said. “There was a broken tile and a whole tile, and I copied the whole one.”
“I am certain that you did, but if that is the original then this is not the copy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are not alone. I think that Mordo was playing a clever game, but I have no idea what it was – only that the stakes were high enough to kill two men.”
“What could be worth that?”
“Money is enough for some men, as you know from your own experience, but Mordo had no access to the treasury, and what trinkets he could have picked up without being discovered would hardly be motive enough. We must look to the vault, I fear.”
Pascha led the way down to the vault, a room whose door Callista had never even glimpsed. Pascha unlocked the door and went in. It was a small room, and even in the lamplight it was almost empty. Callista could see three books, leather bound, and a wooden box on a shelf.
“All seems well,” Pascha said. She reached up and brought down the box, opening it on the small table that hugged the opposite wall. Callista recognised the thing inside. It was Pelion’s Crown, the thing that she had worn at the beginning of her test. “Let’s see if it’s what it was.”
Pascha lifted the slender circlet from the box and turned to Callista.
“You don’t mind?” she asked.
“No.” It was an automatic response. Why should she mind?
Pascha placed Pelion’s Crown on her head a second time, and for a second time the crown paused before it reaffirmed its judgement. The room filled with light.
“Well, that seems genuine enough,” Pascha said. She removed the crown and placed it back in its box, and the box upon the shelf. “And the books seem untouched,” she added.
“Could he have copied them?” Callista asked.
“It’s possible, but I don’t see what he’d have to gain by it. Mordo had no trace of the Talent.”
“He may have copied the crown as well,” Callista suggested.
Pascha smiled. “Inside the tile, you mean? It’s obvious, isn’t it, but also quite impossible. It took Pelion a month to make it. If Mordo had hidden the crown inside that tile and you’d tried to copy it you would have died.”
“Truly?”
“Aye, and there’s no way Mordo would have known that, so you’re lucky, I suppose. Whatever reason he had for copying the tile it wasn’t that.”
Callista wasn’t so sure. Her hand reached for the talisman that Shadow had provided, but stopped short. It was still a secret. When she had copied the tile the coin that hung around her neck had grown cold, almost cold enough to burn her, and Shadow had indicated that it would protect her. She struggled for a moment with the conflict. She knew that she should tell Pascha about the talisman, but Shadow’s compulsion to keep it secret was strong.
Pascha interrupted her dilemma.
“Well, the one certain thing is that I need a new Under-Steward in charge of protocol,” she said.
“Should we not be making efforts to retake Mordo?” Callista asked. “He is a murderer.”
“Of course, but there’s no urgency. He’ll be on the plains for days yet, and easy to track.”
Callista doubted that it would be so easy. If Mordo had planned all this then he would have planned his escape with equal attention to detail. Somehow it did not seem likely that he would be simply riding across the plain for all to see, though it was hard to think what else he might do. He could hardly climb the Dragon’s Back.
“What about your friend?” Pascha asked. “Does he need a job?”
It took a moment for Callista to understand who Pascha was talking about. “Rodric? I can ask him. I’m sure he’ll want it.”
It cheered her to think that Rodric might be staying in Col Boran. He had said that he had nothing to go back to, and now this. It seemed like fate, and Callista would certainly have missed him if he had gone. They were spending so much time together recently.
62 North
Mordo was no fool. He had seen Jidian the Eagle find a man on the plains in a matter of minutes, and he knew they would look for him. He had not taken the horse beyond the city gates, but instead had sold it to a man preparing to leave for Berash. That would be one false trail. He intended to leave others.
The plan was simple enough, if you knew it. He intended to behave in exactly the opposite manner from what they would expect. If he were a fool he would have taken the horse and ridden due south or south east, heading for the kingdoms where he could lose himself in the throng of humanity, but that would never do. They would find him in a day, bring him back, and he would die for his crimes.
Mordo headed north.
There was nothing north of Col Boran, save the White Road, and he wasn’t bound that way. He wanted to get to Afa
el, to the heart of chaos. That was where he could find what he needed.
So he headed north, travelling by night, sticking as close as he could to the foothills of the mountains. Dawn found him camped in a clump of stunted trees, hidden from eagle eyes. He dared not light a fire, but instead wrapped himself in all the clothes he had and bedded down on pine needles for the day. In the evening he rose and made a light meal of cold meat and hard cheese, making sure that he moved as little as possible until night had properly fallen.
With starlight as his only guide he headed north again. They would have discovered that he was gone while he slept, found the body he had left in the vault, and probably begun to look for him.
He walked steadily, knowing that he had three weeks worth of hard rations in his pack. It was going to be a hard three weeks, and he would need every day of it.
Cover was rare and sparse where he found it. Herds of animals grazed the great plain, and even here where the land climbed towards the white peaks of the Dragon’s Back there were few trees.
The one great flaw in his plan was his ignorance of the country through which he was travelling. Mordo knew that there were predators here, and he was certain that he would have to cross several streams, but when he came to the river he knew that he had made a mistake – or at least a miscalculation.
The temptation was to follow it to the east, looking for a bridging point, but that would take him away from the cover of the hills and out onto the open plain, and besides, there would be no bridges this far north. He must climb instead, climb to where the river diminished to a stream.
He turned west towards the mountains and laboured upwards.
Mordo was not an old man, but he was no longer young, and those things that had been easy, that he remembered as being easy, such as trudging up a mountain, were now quite taxing. He had to pause several times, easing the straps of his pack where they dug into his shoulders. The night didn’t help. From time to time he stumbled over a stone he couldn’t see or some other irregularity in the ground, but slowly he became aware that he was winding his way up a valley, that the starlight above was diminishing as the walls drew closer.
He came to a waterfall. He heard it a long time before he reached it, and stopped to look at the river. Perhaps he could wade it here. He had never learned to swim, and dark water frightened him, but he had to try. He sat on the bank and reached into the water with his feet, searching for the bottom.
Nothing. His feet waved sluggishly through the murk. He turned around and let himself down further, as far as he dared, and for a moment he thought he touched something, but he slipped a little further and suddenly his clothes were dragging at him, the river was trying to tear him from the bank. He clung to the grass, afraid that at any moment its roots would fail and he would be swept away to drown in the cold water, alone, his body never to be discovered.
He twisted and reached higher with one hand, then another. The grass held, and he dragged himself free of the water to lie gasping on the bank, soaked, cold and exhausted.
After a while he sat up. He had to keep walking to keep warm. If he rested here in the cold of the night he might never rise again.
He reset his pack, now heavier because it was wet, and plodded on. The waterfall was everything he had feared. It rose twenty five feet above him and the valley closed around it. There was no easy way up.
Mordo paused, looking up at the cascading water. It was black and noisy in the darkness, and he was afraid. The only way past this would be to climb either the valley wall, and then traverse across, or climb the waterfall itself. The first option looked like suicide, and the second impossible.
He could always turn back.
He eased his pack off and sat down. The slope was steep, and he would be climbing blind, and if he fell he would be lucky not to find himself in the water. Try as he might he could not persuade himself to begin the climb, not in darkness.
He opened his pack and pulled out a small bundle wrapped in oiled cotton. When he had made his plans back in Col Boran he had foreseen the possibility of various disasters, but had not thought to be overtaken by one so soon.
He rummaged along the bank in the dark and managed to pull together a few dozen sticks of wood. In a few minutes he had lit a small fire and huddled over it, leaning forwards to catch the warmth. A fire at night was a risk, and climbing the slope by the waterfall in daylight would be a risk, too, but he would do both rather than turn back. Besides, the Eagle, if he was still looking, would be looking elsewhere. He judged the fire and the daylight climb a lesser risk than freezing to death or drowning after a fall.
*
In daylight the climb seemed much easier, and Mordo wondered at his terror of the night before. The pack made it more difficult, but he was able to quickly scramble the thirty or so feet and make the traverse. He stopped for a moment in the early morning light and looked east, towards the rising sun. It was a view to match the best in Col Boran. Now he could see above the foothills that marked the lower part of this river valley and the plains opened up to the east and south. North he could see the beginning of the frozen lands, a terrible whiteness that seemed from this distance to be featureless and devoid of life.
He turned his back on it all and walked upstream again. Above the waterfall he found that he was in flatter country, almost a plateau, into which the river had cut its gorge. The river spread out, widened until it was no more than a couple of feet deep. He gratefully forded it, turned around and headed back down towards the plain. He would walk until he found cover or until night fell, and then he would walk all night. He was far enough north to begin his walk east, well beyond the customary paths of men and far from any traditional route to anywhere.
Mordo had conquered the river as he would conquer anything, with patience, with thought, with reason. His plan would work. He would reach Afael, and then he would be unstoppable.
63 Duplicity
It seemed to be over. The Berashis were as good as their word and the bulk of their troops had disappeared from the other side of the bridge. Sandaray breakfasted alone outside his tent, his table turned towards the river and the abandoned camp. There were people there still, of course. About a hundred, he guessed, but that was what the Berashis had promised – just two companies of archers to watch the bridge.
But Sandaray was waiting for the other shoe to fall.
Alwain had been as pleased as the colonel had ever seen him. It seemed that it almost physically hurt the duke to show pleasure in another man’s work, but he had been hard pressed to hide his delight in Sandaray’s news. The Berashis were withdrawing, and Alwain could return to his comfortable existence at Bas Erinor, his duty achieved, and doubtless there would be some bragging that the Berashi’s had fled before the might of Avilian.
Sandaray cut up the last piece of bacon on his plate. It was Berashi bacon, ironically. His regiment was based in the north west of the country and bought it in bulk from across the border. It lasted well and tasted good.
“Colonel?”
He looked round and saw Willan waiting by his tent.
“Tea, Major?” he asked.
Willan accepted a cup and sat down, but it was obvious he hadn’t come for tea.
“Time for that talk I promised you,” Sandaray said.
“Aye,” Willan agreed. “But there’s something else.”
“What is it, Major?”
“A messenger from Bas Erinor. He came for Colonel Dorcan last night and we got wind of it and persuaded him to repeat his message to us.”
“Don’t ration me, man. Spit it out.”
Willan took a deep breath. “The king was in Bas Erinor with Wolf Narak,” he said. “He degraded Alwain and named a new duke of Bas Erinor. He named Cain Arbak.”
Sandaray closed his eyes for a moment. The implications were vast, the ramifications endless. He could only begin to guess what the end result of this might be. It would take days to see his way through, but some things were clear enough.
<
br /> “Alwain won’t take it,” he said.
“Aye, that’s true enough.”
Sandaray’s regiment owed allegiance to the Earl of Toranda, and he doubted that the earl would side with Alwain against the king, and certainly not against the king, Wolf Narak and Cain Arbak. It would be like siding against history.
The problem was that Alwain knew this.
“He won’t let us go,” Sandaray said, “especially if he knows that we know.”
“Best not tell him then,” Willan said.
“There are other regiments here that would side with us, or at least not side with him.”
Willan shook his head. “You’ll start a civil war.”
“We can’t follow him to Bas Erinor, Major.”
“It may be that Dorcan hasn’t told him yet.”
It was possible. Dorcan was a close-mouthed man, well connected, but he kept himself to himself most of the time. Sandaray didn’t doubt that he was allied to Alwain, but he might be holding the information to gain some advantage.
“We’ll have to move quickly,” he said. “Send a runner to Alwain and ask for a meeting.”
Willan left. There was just a chance that they could get away, make their excuses and head back to the earl’s demesne, ostensibly having seen off the Berashi threat, before Alwain discovered his reduced position. If they were too late it could go one of two ways. Either a civil war could be fought here on the borders of Berash, those northern regiments that Sandaray expected to be loyal to the new duke against Alwain’s somewhat larger force, or they could scatter and make better use of their strengths, and the war would move east to Bas Erinor.
He did not doubt that Alwain would fight. The man had the south in his pocket, which meant most of Avilian’s lords, most of its people and wealth, most of its army.
The runner came back with Willan.
“He’ll see you now,” Willan said. “Be careful what you say.”
Sandaray walked up to Alwain’s tents alone. He’d never felt more alone. Before this Alwain had been an irritation to be managed, but now the man was a danger. In effect he was walking into his enemy’s camp, just hoping that his enemy didn’t know it yet.