SHIANG

by C. F. Iggulden

  ‘Lady Song, where is Thomas?’

  ‘At your door, Gabriel,’ she replied. ‘I will fetch him.’

  There was no fear in her then, but only a sort of slyness, like a cat with blood on its whiskers. Gabriel realised she reminded him of his first wife, who had run off with one of his captains. He wondered if this one would be more trustworthy, or whether he had chosen poorly once more. A man had patterns, he thought. Good or bad, his patterns made him what he was.

  He felt the pulse thump through him again, as if the air moved without sound. It was not a pleasant sensation. It was a summons, an awareness. Or an awakening. He felt a string being tugged in his chest, not as pain, but as if the very matter of him was being drawn away. He wanted in that moment just to set out. To take a horse and the Yuan sword and answer the note that called him.

  Thomas entered and dropped to one knee. The man seemed content in his new role, though Gabriel could see he was a thinker. Not all men desired to lead. Some were happy to be second or third. He hoped Thomas was one of those. Gabriel did not want to kill him. And, of course, he was not completely sure he could.

  ‘Thomas,’ Gabriel said. ‘Have you felt these … beats in the air?’

  ‘I have,’ Thomas said. Gabriel closed his eyes in relief. He’d wondered if he was going mad, like the fool. ‘Last night and just now. What do you think they are?’

  ‘We were brought back with a stone, Thomas. Power calls to power.’

  Gabriel knew he was correct as he said the words. Whatever the stone had been that Lord Ran had used, the threads of others lay to the west. Stones called to stones – and he and Thomas carried one within them. Gabriel sensed he could ignore it; the question was whether he wanted to.

  ‘If I had another stone,’ he said slowly, ‘and Lord Ran to help me, I could bring back men I trusted in life.’

  He spoke warily, testing the thoughts. He had returned to the world just the day before and he had been king for less than twelve hours. Too many things had happened quickly and he knew he needed time to settle and consider.

  ‘Has Sanjin said anything?’ he asked. ‘He was behind you, when we came through. The fool came behind him. Perhaps it is as simple as that, Thomas. I came first, so I am the strongest.’

  Gabriel shrugged. There was so much he did not know. For all his new speed and power, he was as a new-born child.

  He and Thomas looked up as the royal tailor entered the room and knelt, ushering a dozen servants into Gabriel’s presence. The new king of Shiang stood naked before them all, untroubled by it as he remembered a line of poetry he had once known. It was good to be alive that day … but to be young, oh to be young, was very heaven.

  High on the walls of the city, the wind was constant and exhilarating. Tellius clapped a captain of the guards on the shoulder. The man had done well, though of course it was at the orders of his master, Lord Bracken. One thing Tellius had discovered about the Twelve Families – they could argue whether the sun set in the east or the west, but when they agreed, when they moved, they moved fast.

  The defences of Darien had first to be broken before they could be rebuilt. All along the outer wall, stones were being gently prised apart, while new stocks came by river, on barges from the Woodville quarries. New fortunes were being made, with careful accounting of all of it, Tellius was certain. There would be new debts and favours owed by the time the king’s review of the armed forces of Darien was at an end.

  Tellius pressed his thumbs into his eyes, seeing green lights flash. He was weary and he was not a young man. Yet he had somehow become the foreman of the project, with a hundred different requests for attention and decisions that needed to be made reaching him each day. He looked along the crown of the great wall as it began to curve away in the distance. The truth was, the review was long overdue. It should have been something they’d begun after the attack two years before, but there was no point regretting that lapse then.

  All across the city, defences were being catalogued and marked as obsolete, or missing, or in dire need of new funds and labour. The results had meant a fortune in gold coming out of the royal treasury, as well as every noble house. The king could draw on the Twelve Families to the limit of their wealth. That was the ancient compact that served them all, and if they grumbled, they could not deny the results of it, nor whisper that the money was vanishing in corruption. The new walls going up were those of a fortress in pale stone, with massive ridges and buttresses.

  Not every citizen was delighted by the work, nor every head of the great houses. Those families who depended on trade made constant complaint as it was choked off in favour of supplies. Others had lost the labour of their key people while they were trained to fight outside the walls, on the great plain by the river. Tellius had begun referring to it as the Campus, after Lord Canis told him an ancient city had employed a field of war to train its citizens, a Campus Martius.

  From that height, he could see them, the people of Darien, looking small against the vastness of the world. Yet they marched and halted and presented arms. Tellius shook his head in frustration as he recalled the influence Lord Canis had played in the choice of weapons. The men learning field tactics and battle commands on the Campus were armed with only swords and daggers, or long spears. They held shields in their hands and drilled with them as their forefathers had done. Tellius had pleaded for entire gun regiments, but that was the one skirmish he had lost, though it might prove the most important. The Regis family owned the workshops – and it seemed Lord Regis was a close ally of Lord Canis.

  As Tellius watched, a tiny number of men revealed their weapons with a puff of white smoke and, some time after, a rippling crack of sound. He shook his head in irritation. It was not enough to arm small teams in such a way. He had seen the new guns actually used in a street battle, the air alive with bullets and stinging grains. In that moment, he had seen the end of swordsmen on the field, he was certain. The very idea that an army could approach another on foot now that guns existed was a sort of madness. He clenched his jaw. When challenged, Lord Canis had pointed to bows and crossbows, saying those would suffice for common men. Tellius had been forced to concede the point in open debate, as he was not allowed to strangle a lord in front of all the others. Yet he knew every single subject who could afford the rising prices had an order in for a pistol as a private purchase. Other workshops were opening to repair and service the pistols. More than a few were on the cusp of making their own – and it wouldn’t be long before the Hart family entered the market. Whether Canis and Regis knew it or not, many in the new militia would be armed with more than blade or bow when the time came.

  Looking away from those training, Tellius turned to the darker streets that ran below. He could see faces in the crowd as bustling men and women went about putting bread on the table each evening. He knew them, Tellius reminded himself. He was one of them. He did not always like them, but by the Goddess, he understood how they thought. Perhaps Lord Canis was right to fear the common use of guns, but that was a problem for the future. Tellius could still remember the slow horror of the wave that crashed against his city. He believed in the Forza Stone and what it had shown him. Nothing else mattered as much – not the sensibilities of Lord Canis, not even the unrest that might one day lie ahead. They had to survive till the following spring first. He recalled Lord Hart had said something about difficulties in securing finance for gun shops under his own name. The Harts were friendly with the Sallets and proud of the part they had played in the defence of Darien. Tellius nodded to himself. Perhaps he could persuade Win to cover a loan the banks would not. Odds were, it would be a good investment.

  Shouts sounded on his left, so that Tellius turned and blinked at a sight that never failed to amaze him. Lord Bracken had fashioned harnesses for his dogs, so that they could carry the tools and equipment for the men working on the walls. As a new shift began, the animals appeared in a flood, racing along with jingling packs on their shoulders. That they were hunting do
gs was not in doubt. It still took an effort of will for Tellius to pat one as it sat with tongue lolling, looking as if it laughed at him. They were muscular beasts with wide heads and powerful jaws, but Lord Bracken controlled them in some way with the stone he wore on his arm. It looked as natural as breathing to him, and Tellius could not deny the animals were useful. They were so fast! He had spent too many years on the wrong side of the law to ever be comfortable in the presence of such animals. It was just too easy to imagine them chasing one of the old gang through the streets.

  As Tellius watched, the animals were relieved of their burdens and ran off once again, as if they raced one another. Tellius wondered if Lord Bracken’s dogs enjoyed their lives. He suspected they did. Their owner was large and brash. Being accompanied by a yelping pack of hounds made him harder to dislike, in Tellius’ opinion.

  He made his way to the steps and looked across the city to where the Hart estate had its gates. He would see Lord Hart that very evening to guarantee the loan, he decided, whatever was needed. Lady Forza would surely come in on the deal. Either way, it did not sit well with Tellius to have only the poorest denied the new weapons. He had been poor. Even if the new regiments still officially carried swords, it would not hurt to have a pistol on each belt as well.

  ‘Master Tellius! One of the river barges has run aground. Lady Woodville says you must come.’

  Tellius swore under his breath as the house messenger found him. There was another one in different livery racing along the wall. Damn them. He could not find a moment to himself.

  ‘I will be there in an hour,’ he called over his shoulder.

  The messenger set his jaw and followed him down the steps.

  ‘My mistress said I was not to let you out of my sight, Master Tellius. Lady Woodville says you did not come as you promised you would yesterday.’

  ‘Lady Woodville can …’ Tellius began. He forced a smile. ‘She can wait a little longer, I am certain.’

  11

  Hondo

  Hondo woke with frost pinning his hair to the ground. He blew air as a stream of vapour and sighed. He hated the cold. As a young man, he could not recall even noticing it, but after he’d turned fifty, winters had seemed to grow worse and worse each year, as if the world drifted further from the sun.

  Away from civilisation, he had decided it was mere vanity to continue to shave and trim his hair. The straggling beard he’d grown gave him some protection from the wind, though it itched to the point of madness. Even so, it had been the right decision. His service to the king lay in how fast and how well he could complete the task ahead of him. Hondo had been given the name of a man who had offended the honour of the king’s father. Whatever this Tellius had done in his years of exile, Hondo wanted nothing more than to see him at that moment, so that he could consider the journey at an end and begin making his way home with the prisoner.

  He sat up to see white first light and a thick mist lying over tended fields. The boundaries had been marked by their owner with stone walls and neat fences. This was not wild land, but a farm in the middle of nowhere, perhaps a thousand miles from Shiang. Away to the west, Hondo had no way of judging how far they had come, beyond the vaguest of guesses. The first days of good roads, regular taverns and fifty miles a stretch were long behind. His first horse had gone lame and he’d replaced it with a farmer’s mare of lesser quality. The man had been almost in tears, though the mount Hondo had left him was worth a hundred in silver, perhaps more.

  Bosin, of course, had pointed in satisfaction to his enormous shire horse, still plodding on while weaker mounts fell behind. The idea made him insufferable for a time, until Hondo reminded Bosin of the temple dogs of Shiang. Those animals stood almost as high as a man, but lived just eight or nine years. Terriers on the other hand, lived twice that long. Bosin had been silent for days after that. Given that the twins seemed to need only their own company and spoke hardly at all, it had been a period of silent meditation that had left Hondo feeling quite rested and prepared for whatever lay ahead.

  Shiang’s influence had waned over the previous few days, though there had been no clear boundary. Hondo saw it in untended trees left to be a danger to travellers, as well as different crops in the fields. These farmers no longer sent their goods to Shiang. It was just too far to keep the food fresh. Perhaps that was the natural boundary of all cities, Hondo thought, as he stretched.

  No one really knew how far Darien lay beyond. Hondo had seen maps of the world that showed it by another name he could not pronounce, though the king had been certain they were one and the same. Hondo had asked the twins about it and discovered neither had troubled to view the maps. The young appeared to lack the intellectual curiosity he remembered from his own youth. It was somehow less surprising that Bosin had not checked the maps either. Nothing about that man gave an impression of careful preparation. ‘What if I were killed? How would any of you find your way then?’ Hondo had demanded at the beginning of their trip. Bosin had just shrugged at him and pointed west.

  Honestly, the man could be infuriating. Hondo sometimes spent days imagining the giant swordsman hanging by his fingernails off a cliff, or vanishing slowly into quicksand. Hondo enjoyed constructing the last conversations, over and over. He had developed a number of favourite variations on the theme. In not one of them did he manage to save the big man from death.

  The world was rather beautiful when it was trapped in frost, he thought, as he ran through morning patterns with the precision of decades of practice. More importantly, a farm meant food somewhere nearby. Hondo brushed himself down, feeling warmth begin and fade in his chest. He began to shiver again, as soon as he was still. The night’s cold had sunk right into him, as it never had when he’d been young. He slapped his hands back and forth and blew air harder. He was starving, but he would be able to buy eggs at the farmhouse – and a thick piece of bacon. Perhaps even a handful of onions, if he could keep them away from Bosin.

  The twins had woken and were untying their packs, ready to start a fire from the embers of the night before. Hi, or possibly Je, nodded to the sword saint in acknowledgement. For once, Bosin’s snoring was muted by his own bulk, as the cold had made him curl up into a ball. The morning was peaceful and Hondo was glad to be alive. He took joy in such moments of beauty, knowing that they would come to an end.

  ‘Don’t touch your sword and you’ll live,’ said a voice over to the right.

  Hondo looked round in astonishment as a ragged group of men raced down the slope of a hill towards them. They were still some twenty yards off and Hondo cursed himself for his inattention. He’d been too long in civilised lands! The very idea of any citizen of Shiang creeping up on the sword saint was laughable. Yet the result was that he hadn’t been wary of it happening.

  Hondo crossed their little campsite and booted Bosin hard in the back, making the giant grunt and ask a garbled question in his sleep. Hondo kicked him again in a temper. He no longer felt cold, he realised. Perhaps he should begin every day by kicking Bosin awake.

  The half-dozen men who approached their little camp spread out in a fan formation. Only one held a sword, though the blade was spotted black with ancient rust, resistant to all polishing. Three of the others carried long-handled axes, like woodsmen, while the remaining pair held only knives in their hands. Those two jabbed the air with them, as if they could intimidate the camp with sheer effort.

  The twins were ready, Hondo saw, their hands resting on the hilts of swords worth more than the ragged men would see in a lifetime. Hondo wondered if they could even understand the quality of his own blade, made for his own hand by the greatest master in Shiang. Whenever he drew the sword, it passed between lips of brass that caused a note, as if a finger rubbed the edge of a crystal glass. In Shiang, the Ling or Bell sword was as famous in its way as the man who wielded it.

  Hondo kept his hands loose. These men were not worthy to hear that sound. As they came closer, he and the twins took up positions on an arc. They
left a place for Bosin as the giant sat up and smacked his lips, opening one eye at a time.

  ‘When you are ready, Master Bosin, we are being robbed,’ Hondo hissed at him.

  ‘How many are there?’ Bosin replied, looking around blearily. He was about as rumpled as his own blanket, with creases across his face from his own weight as he slept.

  ‘Six men,’ Hondo snapped.

  Bosin lay down once more and rolled himself into the blankets.

  ‘Then you do not need me,’ he muttered, closing his eyes.

  Hondo was tempted to kick him again, but now that Bosin was awake, he was not sure how the man would react. Also, it had been like kicking a tree. He thought there was a chance he had cracked a bone in one of his toes, as he could not clench it in his boot.

  ‘Surrender your weapons,’ the leader said. ‘If you do it now, you will live.’

  Hondo turned to face that one. The accent had been strange, so he spoke slowly and clearly in reply.

  ‘Are you “roadmen”? Yes? You steal from travellers?’

  The fellow was not used to being questioned so openly. He looked over Hondo’s padded coat with a sort of longing. It was clearly warmer than his own. He saw too the perfect black scabbard, with an orange tassel. The man who wore it was bearded and a little unkempt. There was frost in his hair.

  The thief felt his confidence unravelling and his anger grew. He jabbed his sword at Hondo, inching closer. His ragged companions went with him, step by step, like a pack of dogs closing on prey. Hondo had rarely seen a more pitiful crew. He had been warned of such bands of brigands while he had been in Shiang. They were said to be a terror to travellers in the wild lands beyond the influence of that city. The reality was actually a little disappointing.

  ‘Put that sword away, young man,’ Hondo said. ‘It will win you nothing from us. However, I am willing to pay you for directions to Darien. Earn a coin rather than steal one, yes? How close are we to the city?’