by Tim Stead
“It has been eight days, Sheyani,” he had replied. “In six I must give Narak his answer, tell him how to defend the White Road.”
“You are a clever man, Sheshay,” she had replied. “I know it. But cleverness is like a night star. It burns brighter for not being looked upon.”
Cain had ignored her. In a way he knew that she was right, but her Durander way of always having an apposite pithy saying irritated him ever so slightly, and he stared at the useless map ever more fiercely.
She had been gone ten minutes when he gave up. It was never going to come; not like this. And he preferred her company to that of a sheet of parchment and his own desperation. He pulled himself up out of his chair and scratched the stump of his right hand, which had taken to itching annoyingly when he was in the least agitated. Over the months since he had lost his right he had become quite proficient with the left, and only occasionally made the error of trying to use the vanished fingers of his right to seize a cup or pen.
Sheyani was downstairs in the bar, helping the barmen clean the glasses and tables. She smiled when she saw him, and came to him at once.
“You must come with me,” she said, “and I forbid you to think for the rest of the day.”
“You forbid me?” Cain smiled in spite of himself.
“I do. Now come.” She tucked her arm around his and led him out of the Seventh Friend into the street, turning right, following the road that led towards the commercial heart of the low city, the King’s Loyal Market. It was the largest by far of several that sprang up like weeds in any open space in the city. It bore the name of a tavern, the King’s Loyal Servant, that had burned down at least fifty years ago and not been rebuilt. The charred timbers and broken slates had been cleared away and stalls had begun to sprout as if from the ground almost as soon as there was room. The council permitted it, or at least did nothing to close it down.
The old tavern had been big, and now the market was equally impressive. The houses around it had adapted to the situation, and most of them were fronted with rickety stalls. It was a Market that sold everything; food, cloth, oil, candles, lamps, clothes, pots and pans, nails, parchment, wine, jewellery – some of it quite expensive; there were cook’s carts, too, selling a dozen different foods ready to eat, and entertainers in the aisles, jugglers, singers, and even a man who promised to paint your picture in ten minutes flat.
Sheyani pulled him along the rows, stopping every now and then to admire a bolt of silk or a pretty scarf. She was enjoying herself. She bought a length of green silk that she said would make a shawl to cover her head, taking great pleasure in the sport of haggling the seller down. Cain knew that she overpaid anyway, but he didn’t say anything. He could afford it. They were rich. He was a lord.
They stopped at a stall selling sticks of spiced beef cooked on an open flame, and he ate two. Sheyani shook her head at him, mock frowned. She would still eat no meat, but he would not adopt her ways. In truth she did not seem to mind. They took a cup of wine from a stall two down from the meat seller. The vendor swore it was Telan, but it would have been a poor vintage if it was. He enjoyed it anyway. There was something about the day that would have made the roughest country wine taste good.
A couple of men greeted him. They were soldiers. The whole city was full of soldiers, and they saluted and bowed. He smiled at them, shook their hands, which startled them both, and wished them well. Cain could feel himself unwinding, a spring gradually letting out its tension. He was having fun, and he was not thinking.
It was a pig that did it. One end of the market was devoted to livestock. Chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, even dogs and cats were sold here. They were walking past a nut seller, a man doing a brisk trade. Nuts were popular and cheap, and the man had stacks of empty and full baskets.
A great commotion came from up ahead, from where the animals were sold, and they heard the pig before they saw it. A loud squeal, men shouting, laughing, women shrieking with laughter. A good sized pig, white with pink ears, came barrelling down the aisle, making a last run at freedom before it ended up as pork.
Cain swung Sheyani to the side of the aisle, but in doing so could not avoid the animal himself, and tripped over its back as it drove past with all the determination of a Berashi cavalry charge. He twisted as he fell and struck the nut seller’s baskets, the full ones, with his shoulder, and it was like hitting a brick wall.
Then the pig was gone, its noise rapidly distant, and Sheyani was leaning over him, a small worry on her face, a question in her eyes. He rubbed his shoulder.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m fine.” He got back to his feet.
She laughed. “I didn’t think to see you dancing with a pig,” she said.
“It was a fine animal,” he quipped back. “Strong, and what lovely ears!” He kicked lightly at the baskets with a boot. Solid as a rock. The seller had stacked them three quarters full, five deep, three wide. He kicked them harder.
“Do you mind, sir?” the seller demanded. “Those baskets cost money.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. But he continued to stand there, staring at the baskets. There was an idea in his head, but it was no good. He’d thought of palisades, lines of tree trunks buried a third in the ground, sharpened at the top, but it was no good, Wood burned. Baskets would burn, too, but there was another idea trying to force its way to the front of his mind, pushing like the desperate pig past a host of other idlers.
He shook his head.
“Sheshay?”
He held up his hand, tried to let the idea come. It was like trying to go to sleep. Trying did no good at all.
“Something,” he said. “I nearly had something.” Then it came, and he smiled. It was simple, stupidly simple, and he had no idea if it would work. “Where’s the nearest blacksmith?” he asked.
7. A Dream
He dreamed. Again he knew that he dreamed, and this time it was as though he did not dream at all. He was alert, expecting something, willing to learn.
It was dark, but not dark. He stood in a chamber filled with lich-light. It was a long, low cave; long enough that he could have mistaken it for a passageway had he not stood close to the entrance, had he not known.
It was the same sensation in the previous dream. He knew things that he should not. They were just present in his mind, as though they had always been there. In the same way he knew what filled the room.
The darkness glittered. Rank upon rank of Bren Morain stood still and silent, waiting for a command. The room was filled with the threat of unthinking slaughter. He began to count them, but quickly gave up. Beyond the first twenty or so they merged into a seam of gleaming black. There was simply not enough light to make them out.
The body through whose eyes he saw turned and walked from the room. The corridor was no brighter, cut from the same reddish stone, lit by the same luminous lichen, but it seemed brighter. Just smaller, he supposed.
It turned into another room, and he saw the same as before. Rank upon rank, Lines that vanished into the distance. He counted the columns this time. There were fifteen. He tried to estimate the size of the cavern. Half a mile? More? The Bren Moraine stood close to each other, but not that close. Two yards each, perhaps, so four hundred in each column, which meant six thousand in each cavern.
He left the cavern, walked again in the corridor, entered a third, and saw the same thing. Six thousand Bren Morain. It was a guess, but could not be so far from the truth, so eighteen thousand in the three caverns.
He was being shown this. There was something deliberate in the way that he stood in each cavern long enough to be certain what it was he saw, and then moved on to another.
His eyes walked to a fourth cavern, then a fifth. Thirty thousand Bren Morain, all waiting, all gathered. It was already an army that the kingdoms would have to fear. Yet it was more than a year until the Bren had said they would act, twelve months and more before they had claimed they would be ready.
The show did not stop. There were more c
averns full of Morain, but Narak was beginning to be distracted again. Already this army was large enough to sweep Seth Yarra from Terras; easily large enough. Acting in conjunction with the men of the kingdoms it would be a one sided affair. Now he was becoming aware of shadows again, and this time he glimpsed some detail. He saw a single Bren Warrior standing before a stone, a map, he heard the unmistakeable sound of the tunnelers moving rock, the pick fingers, the great arms tearing the stone, and there was a shadow of a cave, barely lit, but a cave bigger than anything he had ever imagined, bigger, higher wider, and a shape, a shadow of a shape, moving out of sight.
He tried to turn his head; tried to will the eyes to move. It was important that he should see what was there, because he did not know, and he must. The knowledge was behind the eyes, but he could not touch it.
“Wolves should not chase what they might not wish to catch.”
It was the same voice; the rolling song of polished stone, the great, godlike voice that he had heard before, and suddenly he was awake again, and again in his full aspect, and bathed in sweat.
Eighty thousand Bren. Eighty thousand warriors, and it was not enough. What did the Bren plan to do with so many? What did it mean? He glanced across the small room. Narala was there, sleeping soundly, breathing the air of the faithful.
Narak had never felt so alone.
8. Books and Blood
Sara Bruff sat in the midst of a city of books and allowed her gaze to wander. She had seen books before. There was the rent book that the men from the tannery had brought round. Her father had owned several, and she had been read stories from them, but she had never imagined that there could be so many books in the world, or at least not so many different ones.
She glanced down at Saul, her son. He was a good boy, never making a fuss. The child was not yet old enough to speak, but he watched the world with placid eyes, and he did not cling or scream. She had thought that he was touched, perhaps, in the beginning. She had seen such people – dull and vacant eyes, minds that understood nothing, but Saul was not such a one. She was certain of it now. His gaze was intelligent, he laughed when she tickled him, his grip was firm and sure.
And now this. With Saul dead, dear Saul who had never been unkind, who had worked all too hard to give her a good life. She had thought that life destroyed. She had begged him not to volunteer, but he had insisted, saying that he could not live in the peace paid for by other men’s blood. Saul had been a good man.
And now this. Picked off the street by a lord because Saul, brave Saul, had apparently not died entirely in vain. He had saved the life of this young faced lord, and the lord in his turn had given her new hope.
She did not know what the future held. Perhaps she would have been better off going to Shillana’s house. Her sister would have treated her little better than a servant, but she would have been safe, and Saul, too. She would have been fed, and had a bed to sleep on, and she would have understood the world around her far more than she understood this place and all its intrigues. Now, however, she was a librarian, whatever that might be, the warder of these books at least, perhaps more. She was to have an apartment, the one that the Steward had trespassed in and so angered the lord. She wondered if the rest of the household would treat her well, or resent that she lived so well among them.
She was determined not be become a mistress, a private whore. She had seen the way that he had looked at her, his glance travelling her body, but there was something else there, too. The lord of Latter Fetch had goodness and steel in him, and she had gambled on what she had seen. There was the boy, too; Tilian Henn. The boy burned with loyalty, with pride, with that exceptional, idealistic naivety that could not be distrusted. It was the boy as much as anything that had persuaded her to trust the lord.
She picked up a book. It was fat and heavy and she had to use two hands to lift it off the shelf. It was bound in cream and red leather, as soft as Saul’s skin. She opened it and it creaked a little, its scent filling her face. It was full of words. Its value was probably greater than everything she owned, not excluding the fine clothes that the lord and Henn had bought her. She flicked through the pages back to the first.
A Speculative History of the Mage Lords, Their Wars, Their Customs, and The Great Conflagration That Brought Them Low.
She wondered that there should be so many words in a mere title. She knew that there were men who did nothing but study and write, scholars, but she had never held or even seen such a book. She stroked the page with a finger. It was smooth as silk, thin as thread, and had taken on a faint buttery colour against which the words looked like flies, ranks of impertinent flies asking to be swatted away.
But Sara did not even know who or what the Mage Lords were. Here was knowledge, albeit knowledge of a past long dead, or a place so far away that she did not know it.
She glanced at Saul. He was still sleeping, eyes tight closed, face quite composed. She began to read.
There were some words that she did not know, but she was able to guess their meaning well enough. The scholar who had written this seemed to repeat everything he wrote at least twice using different words, as though emphasising every sentence, and so lost the emphasis he sought. How brazen of her to criticize so wise a man! She read page after page, and learned that the mage lords were indeed a figment of the past, and a past so distant that it was placed before Avilian, before the beast realms of plain and forest, even before many of the gods themselves.
Despite the turgid prose she enjoyed reading the book, enjoyed it for the story that it carried so poorly. The Mage Lords, godlike men who had ruled all the world, wielded great magic in their time, more so than Duranders, of whom she had heard, and more even than the gods. They fought wars against each other, made and broke alliances, raised vast armies of terrible men called Farheim, armed them with magical weapons and sent them one against the other. After one final great war there were just twelve mages left, the strongest twelve, and all the others had perished.
She wished that there were more heroes in the tale, but the mage lords all seemed as cruel and greedy as each other. There was no justice, no fairness in their lands. She thought of all the men like Saul who must have died, all the family men with wives and children, and she hated those long dead lords just a little, though they were too distant and unreal for her to hate them very much. They were like villains in the stories her father had read to her, only really true while the words of the story were spoken.
She looked up again, and saw that the light outside the windows was beginning to fade. She checked on Saul again, but the boy continued to sleep. She rose and moved quietly around the room, looking for candles, but could find none. Her eye was caught by the bell rope. Pull it and someone would come, he had said. She was hungry, too, and had not eaten since they had arrived at the house.
She wondered about the man in the stable yard; the one who had been bleeding. Henn had told her that he was an assassin, that the lord had been wounded by an arrow, but the lord had not seemed much affected by the wound. She supposed that one became used to such things in battle, or perhaps the wound was not so great.
She did not want to use the bell rope, but the alternative was to leave the library and wander around the darkening corridors of the great house. She could not even remember the way to the kitchens, and she did not know where she was supposed to sleep this night, if the apartment was hers yet or if she must wait a night until it was so. She could sleep here, she supposed, among the books. There were rugs on the floor, and Saul seemed happy enough. But she was hungry, so after some hesitation she pulled on the rope, a tentative pull, but it was enough. She heard a faint noise, a tinkling, bell-like sound, from a distant part of the house. She stared at the door and waited.
It was not long before the door opened and a maid put her head inside. Seeing Sara there she stepped inside and executed a sort of bow, keeping her eyes on the floor. The maid waited for her to speak. She was not sure what to say, or how to say it.
&n
bsp; “Can I have some food?” she blurted. “And candles, or a lamp?”
The maid looked uncertain. “What food, my lady?” she asked.
Choice. She wasn’t used to choice. Usually there was only one thing to eat. You ate what you had and hoped there would be something else tomorrow.
“Cheese?” she asked. “And bread. What do you have?”
“There’s ham,” the maid said. “And fruit, and a good Afaeli sausage. That’s cold. The cook can make what you want, though. A stew? There’s some beef…” she fell silent, as though worried she had said too much.
Sara saw that the girl was afraid of her. She was suddenly somebody of consequence, and she had not guessed it. But of course in the eyes of these people it must be so. She had arrived with the lord, she had been assigned the apartment in which to live, and in the small hierarchy of the estate that put her above the steward, which was ridiculous. She was nobody.