by William King
“No,” Rik said. “It’s not.”
He was half fearful that Leon was going to allude to their time running wild in that city of thieves, and that the lieutenant would hear. He looked around but the Terrarchs were sitting apart, holding themselves as aloof as always.
“We’re a long way from home, Rik,” Leon said. It had been a long time since Leon had called him by his real name twice in one day, and the fact that he did so just then seemed a measure of his unease.
“We are indeed, Leon.” Rik stressed the name, hoping his old friend would take the hint.
“You think there really are giants and spider devils in these mountains?”
Rik felt the others around the fire shift and give the conversation their attention. He guessed such thoughts were on everybody’s minds. “If there are, I am sure Master Severin can deal with them.”
“How can you be so sure? What makes you such an expert?” asked Pigeon, puffing his chest out and walking splay-footed in the way that had given him his nickname.
“Because he knows,” said Leon. “He has read more books than anyone here, maybe even including Master Severin.”
That claim provoked quiet mirth from those that did not know Rik well. The Sergeant said; “It’s most likely true. Never seen anybody read like our Halfbreed. You’d think he was studying to be a lawyer or a sorcerer or one of those other mysterious things.”
Rik wondered if this was some sort of warning. It was the sort of thing an Inquisitor would like to know about. It also showed something of the Sergeant’s ignorance.
It was not that Rik would not have read a grimoire if he got the chance, it was just that he never would. They were things their owners took a lot of pains to keep out of other people’s hands. Rik could only dream of getting a hold of one someday. The Old Witch had taught him some things during what he laughingly thought of as his apprenticeship to her. She had even claimed he showed more than a trace of the Talent but that was when she had been deep in her cups, and oddly sentimental. That had been before the business with Antonio that had driven Leon and himself to flee the city in the company of Death’s own angels.
“I like to read. What of it? You’ve all been pleased enough to have me read you stories from the chapbooks of an evening.” That too was true. They were all of them fond of a story, those who could not read most of all.
“Where did you learn to read, Halfbreed?” asked Pigeon.
“In Shadzar,” Rik said, using the old name for the Place of Sorrow. “In the Great Bazaar.”
“Bet that was not all you learned,” said somebody from the dark. The fruity voice sounded like it belonged to Handsome Jan. Sorrow did not have a good reputation even among the regiments. They might be the gutter scum of the Realms but even they had to feel superior to something, and that something was the inhabitants of Sorrow.
“Was you a thief?” asked someone else.
“Everybody in the Place of Sorrow is a thief,” said Gunther. “If they are not a whore. It is a vile cesspit of every sort of wickedness.”
There was no sense in denying that. Rik felt a strange nostalgia for the covered courtyards and mazy alleys of his home. At least they were warm. He might still have been there now but he had taken the Queen’s gold crown and gone for a soldier.
Of course, if he had not, after the business with Sabena and the jewels, Antonio and his men would probably have had him hanging from a meat hook and Leon with him. Not even the Old Witch could have saved them, if she had been of a mind to, which she most likely was not. She had gotten strange in the later days, as all human sorcerers were said to eventually.
And Antonio was the most powerful crime boss in the city, rich enough to buy immunity even from the Magistrates. It had probably not been such a good idea to sleep with his mistress, Rik reflected. It had been a worse one to help her steal that magic crystal from Antonio’s strongbox.
“It’s a fun place,” said Weasel, just to be contrary. “I enjoyed our time there.”
“That’s because you fit right in,” said another shadowy figure out in the gloom. Weasel just chuckled as if he could not agree more.
“I knew a Terrarch whore there once…” he continued.
“There’s no such thing,” said one of the chorus.
“There is too, least she looked like one of the Exalted…”
“Means nothing, so does Halfbreed,” said somebody else.
“Maybe it was him in a wig,” said Pigeon.
Weasel chuckled again. “I think I would have noticed and so would your mother, since she was right between us.”
“Weasel’s your daddy, Pigeon,” said somebody and then looked up at the sound of footsteps. The Barbarian approached, bringing the hill-man Vosh. Weasel made a place for him by the fire and offered him some biltong and a swig from his special flask. The stranger took it gratefully. Weasel got right down to business.
“What are you doing here with us, Vosh?”
“It’s bad up here, Weasel,” said the stranger. He had the soft lilting accent of the hills. Rik nodded as his suspicions were confirmed. There was no way the stranger could have known Weasel’s name if they had not met before. The hill-man had been with the Lieutenant and the wizard all day.
“Things are always bad in the hills,” said Weasel.
“It’s been worse since the wizard came.” That quietened them. Nobody liked the thought of a wizard being up there, particularly not if they were going to have to fight against him. Wizards were always bad news.
“Wizard?” said Weasel, and even he looked a little worried.
“Renegade Terrarch. Showed up late last autumn. Whispered something in the Prophet's ear and we all had to obey him without question. He turned the old manor house into a hellhole with his experiments. It was bad enough before he started digging the mine. After that...”
“Sounds bad,” said Weasel softly. No one else dared say anything at all. “Mine? Was there gold there?”
“We never saw any. It’s in a cursed unholy site too, near the ruins of Achenar, the old city of the Spider King.”
“What’s this wizard wanting? Why come to the bloody mountains for the middle of winter?”
“Don’t ask me, but it’s no good he’s been up to. He takes people down into the mine and they don’t come back up. At first it was strangers, but then it was our own — people the wizard said were going to betray us. The Prophet agreed. Of course he would, being more than half a wizard himself.”
“I can see where this is going,” said Weasel. “One night he started looking at you slantwise. So you decided that you would run to the Terrarchs and tell them the whole tale.”
“Better that than madmen loose in the mountains, raising ghosts and demons and god knows what else. It's one thing to preach war with the Terrarchs. It's another to start summoning the spawn of the Old Gods to help you. You lowlanders might not remember the old days but we hill-men have long memories…”
“Long memories of the time when you worshipped the scuttling hell-spawned soul-eating bastards,” muttered the Barbarian.
Weasel kept talking. “And the Exalted have promised you sanctuary because among the clans, no matter what the reason, a man who sells out is an enemy. It’s a good way to end up with your own severed dick in your mouth.”
The stranger looked ashamed and defiant. “You would have done the same,” he said.
“Aye, most likely. These wizards have names?”
“Alzibar. He’s a big friend of Zarahel...”
“Zarahel? The Prophet who has been stirring up the tribes?” said Rik.
Vosh nodded. “Thinks he’s the Liberator. Claims the Old Gods are coming back. Claims the old days will return. That the Terrarchs will fall.”
Rik shivered. No one present wanted to think about that. It was one thing to resent the Terrarchs but to have the Demon Gods rise from their graves, to have the old powers of darkness unbound and stalking the land, those were bad thoughts. Even if only a tenth of the t
hings they had been taught about them were true, those were very bad thoughts.
He felt suddenly sure he had stumbled across the secret of their mission. They had been spun a story about the bandits, in case of spies in the camp. He knew what they were really after.
“And we are just kind of heading towards the exact valley where the Prophet and his brother wizard have their camp,” Rik said. Weasel nodded understanding, so did Leon and the Sergeant and a few others. “I wonder why that would be.”
As he spoke Rik noticed a strange silence had fallen over the group. He felt a cold presence over his shoulder and turned to find himself looking up at the silver mask of Master Severin. Its surface reflected the flames of the fire so that it looked like the whole top of the Terrarch’s head was ablaze. It gave him an even more demonic look than usual. His cold eyes gazed down, and Rik felt a momentary dizziness, and the oddest sensation that the wizard was looking deep into his soul. It was not a pleasant feeling.
Severin’s presence cast a pall over everybody. They said nothing, merely sat there like birds hypnotised by a snake. Rik thought the wizard was going to say something but he did not. He merely stared coldly, letting his wintery gaze fall on them, then he beckoned to the hill-man with one gauntleted finger and then strode silently back into the shadows from which he had emerged. The hill-man followed meek as a lamb to the slaughter.
Rik finished sewing the button on his tunic. There was no more conversation that evening.
Chapter Three
The wind blew chill from the moment the Foragers broke camp. The fir trees grew more stunted as the bridgebacks carried them higher. Clouds scudded swiftly across the sky, sometimes obscuring the peaks, sometimes rewarding Rik with glimpses of the sun breaking through a gap.
The soldiers dug out scarves, mufflers and old fingerless gloves and those who had them donned extra waistcoats and shirts. The Terrarchs showed no sign of feeling the cold. Rik wondered if this was some proof of the theory that they did not feel pain in the same way as men do.
As he huddled down in the howdah miserably watching the small icicles of snot forming on the end of Weasel’s nose, Rik brooded on the events of the previous night. Had it simply been his imagination or had the mage showed a particular interest in him? It was forbidden for any human to study the art of sorcery, and Rik had done a little of that, snatching the few crumbs of lore the Old Witch had let fall. Maybe the Terrarch had some way of telling.
If that was the case why not just drag him off and interrogate him? The Terrarchs had been known to do such things despite all the laws that the House Inferior had passed against it. Rik suspected that they only paid attention to the human part of the legislature when it suited their purposes. Everybody knew that the House Superior and the Amber Throne were where real power lay, and that their hand-picked human representatives were there merely to rubber stamp their decisions.
Wizards had even less respect than the rest of the Terrarchs for the rights of men. Most of them behaved as if the Small Revolution had never happened, and it was still the bad old days when humans had no rights at all. Rik took it for granted that most Terrarch wizards would have happily gone over to the Dark Empire but were just too proud to change sides.
Still, things were changing. Having any representatives at all was a step forward. The new human mercantile class was feeling its strength. A century ago General Koth had shown that a human army with guns could cause the Terrarchs problems, even with their dragons and their sorcerous powers. Everybody knew that was the real reason the Queen and her Council of Lords had to grant humans those concessions.
A chill passed through him; things might easily swing the other way. They had in Sardea. That was not something any man wanted to consider. It galled him to admit that there might be worse things in this world than Sardec and his ilk, but there were. At least the Scarlet nations acknowledged that humans were entitled to some rights. The Purples would have them all as slaves again, indentured forever on their vast estates and palaces, subject completely to the whims of their masters. In Sardea, if a Terrarch wanted to kill one of his humans, put him to death by torture even, he could and with no other reason than he felt like doing so. His humans were his property, to do with as he would.
Rik pushed those thoughts aside and returned to the things the hill-man, Vosh, had said. All the talk about a haunted mine, and murderous sorcerers and the presence of the Prophet was disconcerting to say the least. It was clear now why Master Severin had come along, when usually the mages never left camp for anything less than a war or a long holiday. This was magician’s business. He was there to shield them from sorcery and doubtless plunder the lore-books of the wizard when they found him.
The rest of the squad looked no happier than Rik felt. The men on watch needed to keep their heads poking over the side of the howdah and into the cutting wind. The chill was like a sword-cut as Rik discovered when his turn came and Weasel slumped down gratefully and took a swig from his hidden brandy flask. Much to Rik’s surprise, for Weasel was not known for his generosity, the poacher offered it to him.
“You’ll need it,” Weasel said and grinned. For some reason he had always been good to Rik and Leon. It was he who pulled strings with the Sergeant Major to get the pair transferred from the line infantry to the Foragers. Rik guessed it was because he liked having a couple of Sorrow-trained thieves within easy reach. He and Leon had done some housebreaking and pocket-picking at Weasel’s instigation. It had been profitable for all three, but, Rik suspected, for Weasel most of all.
Rik let the burning liquid slide down his throat. It was surprisingly good, smooth and rich, and he immediately had a suspicion where it came from. Weasel had been raiding the colonel’s private stock again, and he had just involved him in his crime. A subtle bastard Weasel was, for all his country poacher’s manners.
He was right though. Rik did need it. The wind was bitter and that was not the worst of it. They were high up on the side of the mountains, moving along a narrow path between the trees, the rock-strewn slope descending steeply to their right. No wagon could have negotiated that narrow way, but the bridgebacks, larger and heavier by far, picked their way along with steps of surprising delicacy. Rik supposed the huge beasts were not any keener than he was to go tumbling down the mountainside, which was reassuring in its way. If they did, those in the howdahs would have been swiftly crushed beneath their weight.
The wind brought tears to his eyes till he was crying like a drunken whore at a low melodrama. Snow drifted down, forcing him to squint, burning on his cheeks, melting on his tongue when he left his mouth open for a second. The path was shadowed and wound around the hills so that part of the line of wyrms was always out of sight.
There was plenty of heather at this height and plenty of big boulders to hide behind. The hill-men were famed for their ambushes. Had the Foragers been afoot they would have matched them, for skirmishing and sneaking was a Forager’s trade, but mounted on these high beasts they were just nice juicy targets.
Rik wondered how well the side of the howdah would stop a musket ball. The flesh of his back crawled as he imagined eyes measuring it as a resting place for a bullet. Too much imagination had always been his curse.
Rik kept a wary eye out for Master Severin but the wizard had shown no further interest, even as they broke camp.
What would it be like to study the deep dark mysteries Severin had been initiated into? He would never know. The laws were strict; only pure-blooded Terrarchs were allowed to pursue the Art. Supposedly only they could study the dark secrets of magic without risking body and soul.
Not that Rik gave a toss about the law. All of his life it had been used to oppress him, and it had once seemed to him that in the Art lay a way of gaining some power over his life, a power that he had never possessed and supposed he never would. Dark as the path of the mage was, – and it was very dark, for madness, degeneration and vice seemed to lie along its entire length, at least for humans – it had always seem
ed the only real road to wealth and power open to the likes of him.
Despite all the laws and the Inquisition, there were, and always had been, human wizards, and their services commanded a high price. He regretted not learning more from the Old Witch when he had the chance.
By such lures does the Shadow seek to entrap our souls, Rik thought, remembering the words of the priests at the orphanage and shivering, not just with the cold.
He had seen what became of some human wizards before they were taken off to bedlam or the burning stake. He knew the warnings against magic were not simply propaganda put about by the Terrarchs but the simple truth, and yet he was still drawn to the Art.
Enough primitive faith had been beaten into him by the priests at the orphanage to make him fear for his soul because of it. What use was mere earthly power when your immortal soul was in peril? Ah, but what if the secret of terrestrial immortality was in your hands, the wicked part of him countered? What then? Guilt stabbed him and he knew it was this guilt that made him so nervous around the Magister.
He caught sight of movement out of the corner of his eye. He gripped his rifle tight as he surveyed his surroundings. It was more for reassurance than because he had any great faith in his marksmanship from atop this moving platform. His plan was to duck first and respond later if he caught sight of any would-be sniper. Better a live coward than a dead hero. He would leave the musketry to better shots like Weasel and Leon.
“What is it?” Handsome Jan asked, glancing up from the shard of mirror in which he had been admiring his noble profile. The others held their weapons ready.
Rik saw nothing even as he scanned the undergrowth and jutting rocks. He did his best to ignore the vistas of dizzying drops that were sometimes revealed. It came to him that they must be running parallel to Broken Tooth Pass and that it was even possible that they had crossed the border into Kharadrea. No shots came. The moment of fear departed, leaving only a small residue burning in the pit of his stomach.