The Bloodstained God (Book 2)

by Tim Stead

  “No,” he said. “Sit a while. Wine?” He offered a jug.

  Thank you, no,” she said. There was nothing much that she wanted to say. A thousand years ago she might have told him how sorry she was, how she missed Narala, too, but it was all unnecessary. He knew. She knew he knew. Words were pointless.

  He filled his own cup and drained it down. Still trying to get drunk, she thought. It seemed that Narak believed that if he drank enough he could still blot things out. He always had, but it never worked. Now he seemed to want to tell her something. She could see the words forming in his eyes, the way he shifted his body to face her, the tilt of his head, but there was indecision, too, a shadow of doubt.

  It was the doubt that won. He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not the right time.”

  Pascha nodded. She stood up to leave.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He smiled. “You know,” he said. She did. For caring. For being the one to bring the food and sit in the dark with him for a moment. For loving Narala. For fifteen hundred years of being there, even when she was not.

  She nodded and left the lair, glancing back as she passed through the door. Narak was leaning forwards, picking up the candle from the table, moving it again.

  * * * *

  Narak reached back behind him, tipped the candle so that wax dripped on the floor on a small space between the rugs where stone was exposed, and settled it into the hardening pool. He turned back, and was almost startled to see the Bren Ashet standing not five paces from where he sat. It was a good trick, that; the vanishing into stone and then stepping out again in the blink of an eye.

  “Where were we?” he said.

  “We have not moved,” the Ashet said, literal to the last. He examined it again. It was a remarkable creature. It had a hundred bodies, perhaps a thousand, he had no idea of the number really, but only one mind. It was the perfect messenger. One stood here with him, short and pale, thin to the point of fragility, and others stood throughout the Bren domains, deep under the earth, scattered.

  “The light is not too bright?”

  “I can tolerate it,” the Ashet said.

  “What were we discussing?”

  The Ashet looked at him and blinked. Blinking was a sign of discomfort. The Ashet were not used to conversation, not given to the form. They listened, they remembered, they reported. Accuracy was their forte.

  “You were questioning me,” it said. “You were asking questions.”

  It was almost clever to put it in so general a way, as though it hoped he would forget his line of enquiry, but he had not. He was trying to glean information about his dreams; dreams that could only be visions through the eyes of the Bren Ashet itself.

  “About dreams,” he said. “Dreams which you claim cannot be.”

  “I said that the Ashet cannot share what we see. It is not possible.”

  “I can do it,” Narak said.

  “You are Benetheon God of Wolves, I am Ashet.”

  “Someone else, then. Something else. It takes what you see and gives it to me while I sleep. I hear its voice. Is it the Bren Alar?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Is it possible?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Do you think it is possible?”

  The Ashet blinked again. He was asking it to speculate, and the Bren Ashet did not speculate. It was detrimental to accuracy. It confused things. “I do not know,” it said.

  Narak looked down at the plate of food that Pascha had brought. It was empty. He was still hungry, he realised. Had he really not eaten for two days?

  “Where are the Bren digging new tunnels?” he asked.

  “There are many new tunnels,” it replied. “The Bren are always digging new tunnels.”

  “Important tunnels,” he said.

  “Tunnels are tunnels. I am not aware of importance. I do not know.”

  Blood from a stone. Water from rock. Anything would be easier than questioning this thing. Either it was dissembling or it was deliberately kept ignorant of such matters. It was even possible that nobody thought to tell it, Narak supposed. After all, it was just a messenger, a conduit for information. Men do not think to tell pigeons about the messages they carry.

  He felt tired. He had not slept for four days, not since Narala died, and for him it was still that day. When he slept that day would end, and a night would put a little distance between the memory of Narala and himself, and he did not want that. Not quite yet. But it was not the hours that made him tired. He could go for a week, even two without sleep and feel none the worse for it. It was a weariness with duty, with war, with tragedy, with all the world. He felt that perhaps he understood Pelion for the first time. How long had the old man waited, grown bored and impatient with the world and all the power he wielded in it? Pelion had lasted longer than this, and yet Narak already felt that departing the world would not be so great a loss, not for him, and not for the world. Yet there were those that still depended on him, and those for whom he cared and would not abandon.

  “Go back to your rock,” he said to the Ashet. He turned away. There was still a cup of wine in the jug and he poured it, raised it to the darkened room. To you Narala, loyal and beautiful, loyal and dead, avenged in a manner that you would not have wanted, but avenged none the less. To you and your dark brown eyes, your perfect skin the colour of good soil, your smile that brightened so many of my days. A day will come when I will join you in the earth, and we will be forgotten together as the ages of the world roll over us, because nothing lasts, not Pelion, not the kingdoms, not you, not I.

  He closed his eyes. Now to sleep, and the little bit of forgetting that it brings.

  25. The Fourth Dream

  Narak dreamed. He knew it at once as a vision dream, a dream that was not a dream. The clarity of his mind was extraordinary. His sight was sharper than it ever could be in real life, and he knew this because he was flying, flying high above the world. He could feel the shape of the air beneath his wings, feel the rush of it over his face, and below, far, far below, he could see forests and villages and towns and people. They were so small, and yet he could see the colour of their hair, count the fingers on their hands. Not even an eagle could see so well.

  He turned, tipped, spilling air from beneath a wing. He slid sideways into a shallow descent, watching the world spin slowly beneath him as he carved graceful arcs in the sky.

  They had not seen him. This he knew. He did not know how he knew, but he was certain.

  He was also certain that this was not something seen through the eyes of one of the Bren. The Bren were creatures of the rock, dark lovers, shy of the light. Here he was bathed in the light of the noon sun, revelling in its warmth as much as he enjoyed the crisp, cold air that rushed by.

  He turned his head from side to side, studying all that lay below. He was picking out a pathway that swept across villages, forwards and back again, and came at last to a town. He knew by looking where he would pass, how the wind would hold him, where the thermals would rise and pick him up again. He saw the places where he must beat his wings, and even the pattern of his breathing was laid down, second by second, and when all was decided, each and every second mapped, he folded his wings and dropped.

  The air became a roaring torrent. Quite quickly its caress became something that tore at his skin, its whisper became a shouting in his ears, and he revelled in it. This was what he was made to do, to be. The land grew quickly. Trees raced towards him faster than arrows, and the ground itself filled up his vision, the horizons that had belittled it passed beyond his sight until it seemed he must strike the earth and plunge beneath it, deep into the core of the world.

  He opened his wings, and they made a sound like nothing he had ever heard, but of course he had. This was the noise they always made, like a great stone splitting, but a hundred times louder, a crack that rang in the villages, echoed in the town, and turned eve
ry head, every face towards him.

  Now they saw him.

  They ran in terror, but there was nowhere to run. He was moving so fast that none could flee, and as he pulled out of his dive, the air screaming over his wings drowning out all other sound, he breathed in; one huge breath, filling him, stretching him. Then he was level, exactly where he had intended to be level, and he opened his mouth and roared.

  But it was not sound that came out, or at least not just sound. It was fire, and the fire cut through the wind, was not turned or lessened by it, but instead bathed the ground, sweeping from side to side with the motion of his tongue, and where it touched, it burned. It was no ordinary fire, and no ordinary burning. People became cinders, trees puffed into smoke at its touch, and stones glowed and dripped, walls collapsing into pools of molten fire as he passed.

  It was a great breath, but it did not last for ever, and soon it was done, but the destruction did not stop. He drew air into himself once more, but he was so low now that he could stretch out and touch the ground, and he did, ripping and ploughing with talons thicker than a man’s leg, tearing buildings from the soil as though they were flowers to be plucked from a field, and he scattered their remains in a rain of mud and brick and wood. People were nothing more than burst fruit when he touched them, and his legs grew red with their juice.

  Narak watched all this with horror, and yet with joy also. Not for the first time he was aware that he knew two minds, his own and that of the creature he inhabited. He saw with both sets of eyes, scented with two noses, and judged with two moralities. The thing that he was, the destroyer, revelled in its power, enjoyed its purpose. It was untouched by the terror and death it caused, or if touched at all it was by a sense of delight, of satisfaction that it did these things so well.

  He reached the end of the first pass and turned. The wind was as solid as a road beneath him. He roared again, and all life perished at the touch of his fiery breath.

  Even as Narak felt the creature’s joy at the power it possessed and knew it to be wrong, so he recognised its seductive appeal. Some men, brave men, rushed towards him with bows, and arrows flew at him. He laughed. His skin was steel, his bones were gold, his eyes were basalt and granite. The arrows shattered against him wherever they struck, and the archers vanished in the fury of his breath.

  I am the wind that comes from the sun itself. I am the fire at the heart of the world. I am the mountain that falls from the sky, and I cannot be stopped.

  Now he flew through the landscape that he had made, all burned flat, wreathed in black and grey smoke, nothing but bare, baked soil, rivers boiled dry, forests of blown ash. Still he roared, and burned the once burned ashes, made thick tiles of the charred clay soil, and burned the air itself.

  At last he came to the town. They had seen him long ago, and each reacted in their different ways, all futile, all doomed. Some men stood on the walls with spears and bows. Some cowered in cellars. Some rode fast horses out of the town gates.

  The brave men, the foolish men died first as the walls disintegrated and melted, and then the ones who ran panicked in the streets, crushed, burned and smashed. A great tower stood at the heart of the town, a citadel of sorts, rising thirty feet above the other buildings, and thirty feet broad. It was nothing. He flew at it, flew into the cunningly laid stone, strongly crafted by masons, and it shattered about him as though it were made of lightly packed snow. Men flew through the air among the broken stone and he burned them before they touched the ground.

  Those hidden below the ground died on his second pass, the molten stone seeking them out, choking and burning them, killing them all as the town died. The last to die were the cowards who had fled, the wise men on horseback. No horse was as fast as he, and he quartered the plain after them, burning one here, crushing another there, until only one remained, and he followed that one, passing him and landing on the ground with an impact that shook the earth itself.

  The man fought to control his horse, to turn it away, but the beast was mad with fear, and threw him from the saddle before bolting back towards the city. He burned it, turned back to the man who now sat on the dry grass of the plain, waiting for death.

  He walked towards the man, feet sinking into the ground unable to bear his massive weight, and when he stood no more than ten feet from the cowering figure he stopped. He did not kill the man, though his heart and purpose desired it.

  “Tell them I am coming,” he said. Those were the only words. He beat his wings once more, the wind from the first stroke pressing the man flat against the ground, and the second lifting him twenty feet into the air. Quickly he was rising again, climbing into the perfect blue sky. His stroke changed, propelling him forwards towards the great mountains in the west, and as he flew he crossed a lake, a great mirror of cold water, blue as the sky.

  He looked down and saw himself, a distant shape, a great cross of wings and body reflected and blurred by the watery glass. He knew the shape, the grace of it, the perfection of form and power that he was, but Narak did not, and now Narak saw what was unmistakable. He saw the great head, the long, segmented wings, the lithe, grey body and the long, scaled tail.

  He was a dragon.

  Narak awoke with a shout. He was bathed in sweat and fully in his aspect. His heart was hammering on his ribcage and his breath came in gasps.

  A dragon! But there were no dragons. Not in all the years of his life had there been dragons. They were a myth, a story, a mistake. What he had seen in the vision dream had not been real. It was not happening.

  He threw aside the thin sheet that covered him and rolled to a sitting position, rubbing his face with his hands.

  A dragon. His vision answered in every way to the myth. He had been vast, powerful, unkillable. There had been no remorse or empathy in the monster’s mind. It challenged his belief that his visions were real. If he clung to that conviction then he was forced to conclude that dragons were real, that they still existed somehow. If he discarded it, then where did that leave him? What purpose did his visions serve?

  A dragon. His mind pointed him inevitably to the Bren Alar. A dragon? He recalled the voice from the dream when the dragon had spoken, and he recalled the voice from his other dreams, the silk and thunder words. They were close enough, though the pitiless voice in the dream was a bland, raw sound compared to the nuanced, wise voice that had spoken before.

  He could not deny the dreams. He knew that some great truth was being revealed to him, a fragment at a time, and now he had seen this. It was a confession. He could see it as nothing less. The Bren Alar had confessed to him that it was a dragon, a destroyer, a fire breather, and even Wolf Narak, most feared of the Benetheon, knew that he should fear such a creature.

  Dragons had been made to destroy the world.

  26. A Bargain

  It was to be an early spring. Word had come from the north, from Wolf Narak and the Eagle god that snows were melting in the White Road Pass and the streams were beginning to flow again. Their time of peace was coming to an end.

  Cain set things in motion. He knew where all the wagons were, where they had to be, who would be driving them, what loads they would carry. He had planned it to the smallest detail. He had even made allowance for several of the carts to fail on their journey north, for delays and hold-ups, and a little extra for what even he could not foresee.

  Unlike the others he knew that his betrothed would be coming with him. He had not even tried to dissuade Sheyani. He knew how valuable she would be in the battles to come, how many lives she might save with the magic of her pipes. For him it was both a burden and a delight to have her by his side. It was one more thing to worry him, one less thing he needed.

  He said farewell to his bed very early, leaving Sheyani to catch up, and made his way to the training grounds in time for first light. It was now a gathering place for the first regiment of the Seventh Friend. Skal’s orders were different, and his men were due to leave the next day, having a shorter journey to their position
. He was by no means the first there. Hundreds of men were already assembled. Wagons had made their rounds and stood fully loaded at their stations while the drovers fed the oxen that were to pull them.

  He found his second, Major Shale Gorios, standing at the centre of the chaos with a sheet of paper pinned to a wooden board in his hand, making marks against one of Cain’s lists. Gorios was a veteran of the wall, a man of considerable education and ability, and a good blade into the bargain. Before the war he had been a merchant, and before that he had served as a soldier. It was a natural progression for the third son of a lesser noble house.

  He grinned when he caught sight of Cain.