by Ben Peek
‘They’re not soldiers,’ he said.
‘It does not appear so.’ Taaira handed him the spyglass. ‘They wear armour, but most are armed with farm equipment.’
The lens of the spyglass took a moment to focus, but Heast saw that the tribesman was right. The approaching group numbered a dozen, each with drawn, heavily shadowed faces etched with exhaustion like deep scars. The best of the weapons appeared to be axes, long-shafted and heavy-headed, but he could count no more than three of those: the rest were hoes and staffs and, on the back of one woman, a rusted scythe. Heast’s gaze settled on the grey-haired woman for, though she rode at the end, she did not hold a tall burning torch. Instead, she led half a dozen draught horses by a thick rope. For a moment, Heast thought that this was proof that she and the others were not soldiers, but opportunistic farmers in the wrong place, but then she shifted, and he could see the crimson sash around her waist, and quickly, he found one around each of the remaining figures.
‘What did we estimate, seven?’ Taaira asked.
‘Eight.’ Heast closed the spyglass. ‘But I would expect another three or four.’
‘A difficult task for the two of us.’
‘We’ll take the tower first,’ he said. ‘But the biggest threat to us will be the ride into the ravine. The odds would favour us better if we slipped in after the trap was sprung.’
‘If they charge the ravine while we’re fighting, we may not save any, I fear.’
Heast grunted sourly in agreement. He had thought that he could lose up to half of whatever force arrived and had been, if not pleased, at least able to accept that. But the torches that the men and women carried were bright markers, and a seasoned Leeran soldier would make short work of the targets. Because of that, he and Taaira would have to charge the ravine without any light – and both would have to hope that the ground was not pitted, filled with sudden drops or holes in which their horses could break their legs.
Running his hand down his beast’s neck, Heast gripped the saddle’s pommel and pulled himself up. ‘One last chance,’ he said to the tribesman. ‘You don’t have to fight if you don’t want to.’
‘Captain.’ Taaira wrapped the bridle around his left hand and pulled himself up. ‘I am Hollow.’
‘Once I start—’
‘Is this conversation for me, or for you?’ One-handed, he drew his heavy blade from its sheath and, for a moment, it looked as if he held a piece of darkness. ‘The shame that is before me is one I have felt before.’
‘There’s only shame in death, boy.’
Heast was the first out of the camp.
He let the horse have its head in the pace that it set towards the ravine. It was fast and sure, but Heast would have pushed it faster, if he had not trusted the training that Kal Essa’s Brotherhood had put the beast through, if he had not trusted the battles it had already fought. Like him, the horse was a veteran, a creature that would find itself on familiar ground once the battle began.
In his hand, Heast’s sword was weightless. He held it low and, as the lip of the ravine showed itself in a craggy broken-toothed opening of scrubland, he raised it.
The tower sat five, maybe six hundred metres after the opening, a dark, solid shape. Inside it, he would be able to funnel the soldiers spread around for the trap, he would be able to use the walls as protection against crossbows. He knew he might not get all of them inside, where he and Taaira would be able to control who they fought, but he would get enough in there that the numbers outside it would be in his favour. Behind him, he heard the solid gallop of Taaira’s horse, the reassuring fall of the hooves, the presence of a man who, Heast believed, would ensure that little resistance would be offered.
In front of him a Leeran soldier rose from his concealment, hastily aiming his crossbow. The bolt flew wide and Heast’s horse did not pause as it rode over him with a sickening crunch.
Movement and sound erupted around him after that. Heast heard shouted orders from his right and heard bolts burst from the positions he had identified earlier. Another two Leeran soldiers were revealed by their voices deeper into the ravine, where it was darkest, but he did not turn to them, or slow his ride to the tower. His sword slashed out, but it hit metal and skidded off, catching the edge of something – but causing what damage, he could not say.
Ahead, the dark bottom of the tower cracked open and a woman stepped out. She was a solid woman, and in her hands she held a heavy crossbow, which she lifted calmly to her shoulder. Only for her shot to go wide as a roar tore through the ravine.
It came a second time and Heast, as startled by the sound as the Leeran soldier, turned to his right to see Kye Taaira drive his horse into the darkness of the ravine.
‘Nsyan!’ the tribesman cried out.
A third roar sounded from the darkness and, to Heast’s gaze, it appeared to ripple. With a curse, he drove his heel into the flank of his horse and continued alone to the siege tower.
3.
A certain psychological insight had become evident after they had selected their rooms, Bueralan believed. Taela, the first of the three to take a room, had chosen one at the far end of the building. Located on the first floor, it had a single, narrow bed before an equally narrow window, and it felt, the one time the saboteur thought as he had stepped into it, like a fist closing tightly shut around you. The room he had opted for – a simple guest room that overlooked the dug graves – was larger, but without any of the personal touches of the first. Once he left, no one would know that he had been there. But Samuel Orlan’s room was different: the cartographer had chosen the one room equal in size to Yoala Fe’s master bedroom. While it did not have the golden handles on the drawers, or darkly polished furniture, or the elegant rugs laced with thin strands of precious silver, the room had clearly been designed for guests of importance and substance.
Bueralan discovered that the old cartographer had stripped the walls of its curtain and tapestries in the early hours of the morning. They lay across the floor, against the wall, and both on and under a small maze of chests and tables that he was forced to navigate to cross the room. Once inside, Bueralan saw that the cartographer had pushed the rest of the furniture into the centre of the room, leaving the bed locked in the centre amid a pile of unmade blankets.
Samuel Orlan stood in the far left corner of the room on a chest of drawers. In one hand, he held an expensive quill, in the other, an ink pot. Before him an elaborate, detailed map of the world sprawled across the first two of the pale-orange-painted walls, beginning at the door frame where Bueralan stood. It gave the impression of a world slowly being consumed by fire.
‘It helps me relax.’ The cartographer spoke first, his arm outstretched to a high point on the wall. ‘Surely you have something that takes your mind off your troubles?’
‘I like to drink,’ he replied.
‘I have not seen you drink once.’
‘Maybe I’m not troubled.’ Orlan had begun with Ooila, Bueralan saw, as he turned to gaze at the wall behind him. The cartographer had drawn the continent around the frame of the door and, if left open, it looked as if a hole had been dug into the middle of the continent. ‘How’s that lie?’
‘Poor.’ The cartographer dipped the quill into the pot, then tapped it on the edge. ‘When you first met Ekar Waalstan, I was impressed by how well you held your own in that situation. You were in control, you were dangerous: you clearly should not have been left alive. I have often wondered if that is exactly what happened – that Ger made you god-touched then and that Bueralan Le died then – since I have not seen that man since.’
‘Every now and then, Orlan, I start to like you.’ He grabbed a chair from one of the tables and turned it upright, before sitting. ‘Then I remember that you killed my friends.’
‘And for my crimes, I stand here now.’
‘Your crimes?’ Irritated, he spread his legs out and slouched in the chair. ‘For your crimes, you’re drawing a map on a wall.’
‘And
you’re sitting in an expensive chair.’ The quill tip scratched furiously across the pale-orange paint as he spoke. ‘In Jeil, I was given an opportunity to part ways with you. I had expected it for days and I had, for my part, thought to let you go. It would have been very easy for me to do so. I am not a cruel man and I could see how painful my presence was to you, but it was clear to me that you did not understand where you were going. You did not understand what had happened to you. Worse, you did not want to know.’ He sighed and lowered the quill. ‘I tried to warn you what awaited here, Bueralan. I tried to steer you away from Ooila, from the Mother’s Gift, from Aela Ren, and from the child. I may have failed, but I have not walked away, either. Try to acknowledge that I have done that for a reason.’
Bueralan did not want to acknowledge that. ‘Yeah, I’m in your debt,’ he said, but the dry defiance rang false. He cleared his throat. ‘Let me ask you, what will happen when Ren hears the child’s name? If, that is, he hears her name?’
Orlan turned to him. ‘I imagine he’ll stop his war, if that is what you wish to call it,’ he said. ‘He’ll pledge allegiance to her and take his army to Leera to be part of a new war.’
‘His fabled army,’ the saboteur said as he turned the words over in his head. ‘How come we haven’t seen that, yet?’
‘Just be grateful,’ he said. ‘It is a sad collection of men and women.’
‘What about the old man from Dirtwater?’ Bueralan asked. ‘Was he one of Aela Ren’s soldiers?’
‘No, not him.’
‘How’d he know you then?’
‘He had met other Samuel Orlans.’ His laugh had a hard edge on it. ‘Not one of the men or women who came before me has been beholden to Aela Ren, a point you should never forget. He may view you and I as if we are sacred men, Bueralan, but he is a monster made from the wreckage of the War of the Gods. He has lost everything that gave him purpose, and without it, he has fashioned his own terrible purpose, and of those who have seen it – well, that old fool in Dirtwater is one of the fortunate ones who has avoided it.’
Bueralan began to speak again, began to push further into the mystery of Ren’s army, when his voice was suddenly cut off by the front of the mansion crumbling beneath an explosion.
He was out the door ahead of Orlan. At the end of the hallway, where the first floor gave way to the large, open floor where Aela Ren had slaughtered the Saan warriors, sat two huge piles of rocks. Roped together by thick netting, they had torn through the balcony and doors. The rocks had been followed by burning pitch, which was now taking hold of the building.
Bueralan and Orlan ran down the hall towards it, but took the first turn that presented to them, keeping ahead of the smoke that was rolling towards them. But soon its long fingers began to claw ahead, a dark promise as the two turned again and again on their way to the small room that the Queen’s Voice had taken. Neither spoke, either to ask about Taela’s welfare, or about Ren’s, though Bueralan assumed that no matter the damage done to the front of the mansion, the Innocent had not been killed.
The door to Taela’s room was shut and the saboteur shouldered it open . . . only to be greeted by an open window.
4.
Ayae walked down to the carriage beside Caeli, a cut of the moon finally beginning to show through the fading cloud cover. She believed that the way it revealed itself mirrored the way in which the world had begun to reveal itself to her. Captain Heast was in Faaisha. Lady Wagan was pushing to move the Mireeans from Wila. Caeli’s words – the words that, as that first night had continued, and the laq had disappeared, had become more and more blunt – had not explained everything to her, but it had explained enough that, when she eventually slept, in her dreams the black water around Wila had turned into the battle-scarred walls of her childhood and when she had awoken, Ayae had been able to stand easier than she had since awakening after Faise’s death.
Before the two women began to walk down to the carriage on the night of Lady Wagan’s meeting with the Traders’ Union, Caeli had taken Ayae out into Yeflam. She had been surprised by how many more guards filled the streets since she last left the house, and the sound of the Yeflam Navy’s drums had echoed each step she took. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she saw little of the residents: most remained inside; many of the markets and shops had been shut up, with some of the shopkeepers going so far as to board up the windows.
She had thought that Caeli would leave her after they returned to Faise and Zineer’s house, but she had not. A day waited before Lady Wagan’s meeting with the Traders’ Union, a day of quiet if she had wished, but instead, Caeli had looked at the broken remains of the back door, at the material Ayae had to fix it, and the two had begun to repair it as best they could. It was solid labour, work with their hands and, before they left the house to take the carriage to the Traders’ Union meeting, they stood before it to admire the finished product.
There, Caeli offered her a dagger.
‘I still have a sword,’ Ayae said, declining the weapon. ‘It’s in my room upstairs.’
The other woman spun the weapon over her hand and then slipped it back into the leather sheath at the back of her belt. ‘You should bring it,’ she said.
The sword lay on the bed, dropped there after Ayae’s heavy body had threatened to break the bed frame and she had taken to sleeping on the floor.
The carriage that awaited them now was drawn by two horses, both black. At a casual glance, it appeared as most carriages in the streets of Yeflam did. It was made from darkly lacquered wood, had a single door with a window and a second window at the back, both covered by cloth. Its shell had seen better days, with the salt water leaving stains on the wood, and with an array of chips and scratches around the bottom of the door where people stepped in and out, and where stones had flown up from the ground. The wheels had fared no better. But the driver, a large white man who gave the appearance of huddling deeply in a cloak for warmth, did not quite pull the thick covering around him as he might if he were cold, and the look he directed at Ayae and Caeli as they approached was not that of the casual driver, a man who might appraise either with a gaze she found uncomfortable, but rather he looked at them with a soldier’s gaze. His nod to Caeli, faint though it was, was that of a subordinate to a superior. Ayae’s observation was further supported when the door to the carriage opened and the Lady of the Ghosts, Muriel Wagan, was revealed to be sitting within.
The carriage sagged with her heavy weight as she climbed in. ‘Lady Wagan,’ she said.
‘Ayae.’ The carriage jolted as it began to move, interrupting her. Once it settled into its pace, she said, ‘I had thought I would see you here. It is a pleasure, of course.’
If Caeli’s appearance at her door the other night had suggested a week of living rough, of a series of cold meals, and a cloak wrapped around a sword as a pillow, Muriel Wagan’s appearance suggested an altogether different experience. She wore the green and white gown that she had worn to the trial, though it had been cleaned since, and had neither the rumple nor crease of a gown previously worn. Her hair had been freshly dyed, but while the grey had been removed, so had the red, and her hair had a dark-brown colour that sat oddly against her pale skin. It was her eyes that spoke the most difference, for while Caeli’s had taken on a certain flat hardness, Muriel Wagan’s were set behind dark bags, and had a sharpness to them that Ayae could not meet for long.
‘Were you told,’ the Lady of the Ghosts asked, ‘that we are going to a brothel?’
Ayae glanced at Caeli who, across from her, shrugged. ‘Sin’s Hand?’ she said.
‘That is the place,’ the older woman said. ‘It is a building I have owned in Yeflam for a long time, just as I own the man it is named after, Sinae Al’tor. Did Aned tell you of him?’
‘He was to help Faise and Zineer leave,’ she said. ‘He helped them get passages.’
She nodded. ‘Once we leave this carriage, only he out of the people you meet will be trustworthy.’
‘Who will w
e be meeting?’
‘Lian Alahn and Benan Le’ta.’
The carriage bumped as it began to climb one of the stone bridges between cities.
‘Alahn has wanted to meet you for a long time,’ Lady Wagan said, after it became clear that Ayae would not speak. ‘He has wanted to tell you about the Enclave’s agreement with Leera. He knew the extent of it before the trial, so his outrage then was opportunistic, of course. I imagine that he still wants to try and convince you to become a tool for him to use to hollow out the Enclave, since tomorrow’s announcement will make the task he has been working on for years difficult. Since you’ve had no desire to meet him, I can only imagine you will say no. Still, he is going to help us move the Mireean people from Wila to the southern land of Yeflam over the next month, so he has his uses, even if the price I had to pay for doors to be opened for him in Zoum was somewhat steeper than I wanted.’
‘And Benan Le’ta?’ Ayae asked quietly, her voice sounding to her as if it were spoken by another. ‘Why is he there?’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is something we all have to wait and see.’
5.
‘Do not look for him tonight, brother.’
‘He is out there.’ The door stood open, a cold wind touching the frame. ‘If he is in need, I cannot ignore him.’
‘After tomorrow, I will help you. We will both help you, but—’
‘Tonight is before tomorrow.’
Eidan closed the door behind him and his heavy steps took him down to the gate.
Zaifyr continued down the stairs to the bottom floor, the shadows of the stairwell falling off him as if he were a spectre. He had been working upstairs when the door had opened and he had arrived only to hear the end of Jae’le and Eidan’s conversation, but he did not need to ask where the latter was going. He had watched Eidan go past the gate of Aelyn’s estate and disappear into the dark streets of Yeflam after her visit the previous night. Eidan had returned in the final hour of the afternoon only after he had walked throughout Nale, his deep-set eyes and creased face scouring each corner and rooftop with the concern he had for the creature named Anguish. After he had returned, he had done nothing but relentlessly prowl the floors of the house. That was what had driven Zaifyr upstairs.