by Jude Fisher
One cut was all it would take to destroy for ever the thing he had made. It was a fitting end, and probably the only effective one. The northerners had many superstitions about afterwalkers, the dead which rose and carried on an existence against all odds, against nature. Just as he had allowed Virelai to do. It had been curious to fill the aborted foetus with his sorcery, to bring it swiftly through its growth, to set it to running and talking, fetching and carrying. It had become a walking testament to his remarkable powers: every day, it reminded him of his prowess. He had even become quite fond of it, in his own way. Until it had tried to kill him, and had stolen the Beast and the Woman. Two of the world’s three most powerful entities, did he but know it.
The Master could not help but smile. Such a fool: such a waste.
‘I must take your head, Virelai, my boy,’ he cooed over the unconscious figure. ‘That’s what you have to do with the reanimated, you know: sever the head from the body and keep them apart from one another. The Eyrans bury the head on an island, if they can: they believe that a circle of salt and water will hold a restless spirit at bay. Or sometimes they burn it all to ashes. But I’ll need your head for just a little while, my boy: must have a token to show the Istrians the victory is mine, and claim my prize.’
He stopped for a moment, as if listening to a voice inaudible to all others. ‘And Tycho Issian, whose guise you still carry, thanks to my skill? Ah, well, he shall perish swiftly, before he can raise any alarm.’
There came a powerful rumble which shook the ground, filled the air.
The Master frowned. It was unusual, but not unheard of, for there to be earthquakes this far north in the Istrian continent. He steadied his hold on the hilt and the hair. ‘I’m sorry, Virelai: but you had a good long run—’
He swung the blade.
It hit something solid; but it was not Virelai’s neck.
From the battlements people cried out in wonder and awe.
From the Eyran lines, men did the same, shielding their vision against a sudden white light which flashed briefly, leaving a jagged after-image on the eyeball. And when the light faded there it was: the world’s most massive tree – an ash, by the look of it, with its deeply incised bark, its vast crown of leaves, quite unseasonal even in the milder southern continent, its wide, gnarly roots. Its trunk displaced both lake and bridge and stretched from foot to battlement of Cera’s tall castle; and in its topmost branches, apparently lifeless, lay a single figure, garbed in crimson and silver.
King Ravn’s men clutched their talismans and made the sign of Sur’s anchor to ward off this evil sorcery; and in Cera’s castle, Tycho Issian felt a searing pain in his head and fell to his knees. Others prostrated themselves, begging the Goddess to protect them. Did they but know it, she was standing close by them, in the tower room to the west of the battlements, gazing out over what she had brought forth from the earth, her eyes like lamps.
Ravn Asharson shook his head. He felt odd, dislocated from himself. But there was no pain, nor any blood that he could see, no lost limb nor obvious wound; but he had little recollection of the fight, and none at all of this tree which had sprung out of nowhere, churning up the ground, displacing the muddy water of the moat, crashing up through the makeshift drawbridge, showering debris in its wake.
At his elbow, Rahe had appeared as if by magic. The old man stared upward till his neck muscles stood out like corded rope. He was red in the face, his eyes bloodshot, and he was breathing too heavily for his exertions to have been caused by a simple walk across the sward. He looked, if anything, afraid.
‘By the seven hells,’ he muttered. ‘She’s come back to herself. And she knows, she knows . . .’
‘Knows what?’
The Master started, forgetting he had spoken aloud. A crafty expression came over his face. ‘She . . . ah . . . knows you have come for her, my lord.’
Given the presence of the Eyran army, that was indisputable.
‘Where did the tree come from?’
Rahe fixed him with a beady eye. ‘Your queen,’ he said maliciously, ‘seems to have taken something of a fancy to this Tycho Issian.’ Then, before the northern king could ask him anything else, he turned on his heel and limped back to the Eyran lines.
Ravn frowned. Nothing was making sense.
‘How can this be?’
The Rosa Eldi waited for the topmost branch to bring her its freight, then helped the pale man in through the window. Safe at last on the bed, he stirred briefly, his eyelids fluttering, then was lost to her again. She ran a cool hand across his cheek, feeling the life in him: her life, the life of Elda. It ran strong in his veins, though it had not always been the way of it. She felt the traces of the Master’s old magic on him, and she would soon scour that out.
‘Virelai,’ she breathed. ‘Open your eyes. Virelai . . . my son . . .’
By nightfall, by which time it was abundantly clear that the Istrians had no intention of parting with his wife, nor of ceding the castle to him, Ravn was in a towering fury.
‘We shall besiege them,’ he insisted.
‘But, Ravn—’
The eyes he turned on the Earl of Stormway were as black as ink. The reflection of the sconce flickered deep inside that grim regard, a small light in a very dark place.
‘I will not leave this place without her. No matter how long it takes and even if I have to keep the promise I sent Cantara’s lord.’ He turned to the guard captain. ‘Send men into the forest to find whatever timber they can. Send another contingent to unearth and drag back the biggest rocks they can find. Dismantle that farm over there—’ He indicated a stone house and outbuildings on the far side of the river valley. A curl of smoke wafted foolishly from its chimney.
The guard captain hesitated. ‘It’s full dark, sire—’
Ravn waved the man away impatiently. ‘What do I care for that? I will not have my wife spend an hour longer than necessary in the company of this Istrian trickster. Bran?’
‘Sire?’ Stormway’s disbelief made the single syllable two.
‘Send me the engineer.’
‘Karl Hammerhand?’
‘At once. And rope, we’ll need rope.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Strip the ships, the rigging, the hawsers, everything.’
‘Sire!’
The fire in Ravn Asharson’s eyes seemed more now than a mere reflection of candlelight: they shone with the incandescence of madness.
‘We will not be leaving here without her; without her we will have no need of ships.’
Thirty-eight
The Bone Quarter
Following Persoa’s trail proved to be impossible. It was not only that the hillman had carefully disguised his tracks, but also because of the very nature of the ground. South of Cantara, where the farmers had given up trying to tame the soil, they encountered a region of dense scrub full of prickly plants and straw-dry grasses; and beyond that the land gave itself up to full desert, to endless vistas of dunes and bare rock battened below a bowl of hot blue sky. In this ever-shifting, ever-mutable place, nothing held its shape for long. The dunes were always on the move, grain by grain by grain, in a ponderous, inexorable ebb and flow; and then the wind intervened with all the arbitrary playfulness of a bored child, rearranging the topography to its own satisfaction, then demolishing what it had made to start over again.
Katla shielded her eyes against the glare of reflected sun. Her first reaction to the sight of the desertlands had been one of wonder and delight. The dunes stretched away from her to the dusky smudges of the mountains on the far horizon in serried ranks, their replications made elegant by the sharp contrast of sun and shadow. There was a stark simplicity in the stripped-down vista, a harsh beauty which reminded her of deep ocean, or the uplands of Rockfall in winter, when the land lay cloaked in snow and ice, its features rendered mysterious and deceptively lovely. A foot wrong there could reward you with a twisted ankle, a broken leg, a plunge down a crevasse; here, the dangers were more insidious. In the highl
ands of home, Katla knew every cave and overhang, every rocky lee: exposed to the teeth of Eyra’s treacherous winter storms she could, if worse came to worst, dig herself a snowhole and suck ice for moisture and wait for the weather to blow over. But here, there was no shelter, no sustenance, and although to one raised in the cold, wet north it was hard to see sunshine as anything other than a blessing, the desert sun was mercilessly hot. It beat down on her head like a hammer, stole the strength and vitality from her muscles, parched her inside and out.
If she stopped to think about the prospect of this journey for more than a few seconds, she would have had to admit to the fear that they would die in this place, worn out and burnt up. But her comrades seemed determined. She glanced sideways at Saro Vingo, riding to her left, and thought, unwillingly but for the hundredth time, how exotic he looked, swathed in the style of the desert tribesmen, only his flashing dark eyes visible between the folds of white cotton Flavia Issian had made them all wear.
He caught her looking and bobbed his head away awkwardly. Then he moved forward to join the mercenary leader. Mam’s wide hips moved with the sway of her horse, and her chin thrust resolutely south. She had barely said a word since they’d started out, and every so often Katla saw a tremor in her thigh as if she had to resist spurring her mount to a gallop, the quicker to catch up with Persoa.
On the first night they hobbled the horses and set up a light circular tent on a frame of flexible willow which the nomads had brought to them, along with a dozen skins of fresh water, a sack of flatbreads and nutritious pastes made from olives and tomatoes, apricots and berries from Cantara’s storerooms; as well as muslin-wrapped sausages and jerked meat. There was also a pot of foul-smelling white grease from one of the old women. ‘Even though it may offend your nose, it will also save it!’ the crone had told Mam, and advised that they smear it on their hands and lips, too.
As the sun fell below the hazy horizon, the temperature dipped and continued to fall. Katla awoke in the small hours with her teeth chattering. She sat up and rubbed her face and hands, then wrapped her clothes around her so that the air could not get in. Then she lay awake for an age, listening to the regular rise and fall of Saro’s breathing, amid the stertorous snores of the mercenary leader. When she was still awake to see the first light prick the tent flap in the morning, she was not a happy woman.
‘You snore like a bullfrog!’ she chided Mam as they broke their fast.
The mercenary shrugged. ‘No one’s ever complained before.’
‘Who would dare?’
The sharpened teeth glinted in a half-smile.
They crossed the unforgiving desert terrain for another two days without incident; on the third came a change in the weather.
It was Saro who spotted the tell-tale sign: sand smoking off the tops of the high dunes like spindrift off a mountain. He pointed it out to Mam, who grumbled something about not having the time or inclination to indulge herself with poetic observations of the scenery. Forced instead to address Katla, he said, ‘We should take shelter. I’ve heard about the sandstorms out here. There’s an ancient legend about an entire army vanishing in the Bone Quarter – a thousand men, and all their horses and yeka too. They left Tagur amid cheering crowds who strewed rose petals under their feet; they were expected to reach Gibeon four days later. The story goes that a great mage sent a sandstorm which swallowed them up. They were never seen again.’
Katla quirked an eyebrow. Then she frowned. Shading her eyes, she stared into the distance. ‘Can you see the mountains?’ she said suddenly.
Saro looked. Where before the peaks of the Dragon’s Backbone had shown as a hazy indigo outline against the fierce blue of the sky, now he could see no delineation at all between earth and air.
Soon after this the first of the winds began to buffet them. Sand stung their faces in the gap in the headpieces till they were forced to relinquish clear sight and pull the fabric higher. Bitten in a thousand places by the stinging grains, the horses skittered nervously. Saro urged his mount forward and gestured to Mam, who gave a reluctant nod. In the lee of one of the great barchans they crouched anxiously, with the horses pulled down beside them, hoping that the vast arc of sand above them would not abruptly plummet down upon their heads. This was worse than an avalanche, Katla thought, scanning the darkening air full of whirling devils and columns; this was worse than a white-out blizzard.
It seemed to go on forever, the storm, and was accompanied by an unearthly howling as if a thousand ghosts had risen and were dancing with glee. She could not help but think of that lost army, its armour rattling against its bones, a thousand voices raised in fury at their senseless deaths out here in this pitiless place, where neither goddess nor blind chance could save them. At some point, though it was impossible to tell when, day passed into night and then into day again. The wind changed direction, bringing the sand driving into the flank of the dune. They moved around its base on hands and knees, one hand clamping their linen masks tight to their faces, the other dragging the reins of their mount.
The animals were plains-bred, sturdy beasts with great endurance and a strong desire for survival; even so, Mam’s horse could take the howling sand in its nostrils and ears no more. Eyes rolling, plaintive whinnies splitting the air, it hurled itself upright and away from the group, dragging the reins out of the mercenary leader’s grasp. For a moment it bucked and shied as if it, too, were dancing; then it galloped into the storm. After that, there was nothing any of them could do but watch as its darker shape melded with the airborne sand and disappeared into the gloom.
Nobody said a word: there was nothing to say. And no one wanted a mouthful of desert.
After an unknowable amount of time, the raging noise died away and light returned to the world. The landscape into which they emerged had been repatterned by the storm, the dunes orientated in a new direction, vast striations radiating out of the south. But in the clearer air the spiny peaks of the Dragon’s Backbone stood out more clearly against the pale horizon and they took heart from that and carried on; first one walking while two rode, then changing places.
There was no sign of the lost horse, not even its hoofprints impressed into the new surface of the desert; but as the sun began its diurnal fall, its red rays limning their right sides like fire, they spotted something on the ground a few hundred yards ahead, something in this monochromatic world which broke the eternal symmetry of the desert.
As they came closer, the shape resolved itself into something smaller than a horse.
A man.
‘Persoa!’
Mam fell from her horse and ran stumbling towards the figure with no care for anything, leaving Katla to grab the reins before they lost a second mount.
It was not the hillman. They found Mam staring puzzledly down at the thing on the sand, one hand up to her mouth. Even face down, it was clear that in life he had been a much bigger man than the eldianna, great of girth, tall of stature. He had been dead for some time: through the ripped fabric of his clothing, it could be seen that the skin was parched and dried to leather. His out-thrown hand had split apart. It was vast: a giant’s hand.
The body was hard to turn over, but at last the dead man fell back with a whoomph, sending out a billow of dust that had them all coughing.
Katla wailed. Mam stared. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before,’ she mused, entirely unaffected by the ghastly sight the corpse presented, now that it was obviously not Persoa.
‘It’s Urse,’ Katla whispered. ‘Urse One-Ear.’
And indeed the dead man had only a single ear; as well as a disfiguring rift which all but bisected his face, a mangled throat, and a torso striped with wounds.
Katla turned a shocked face to Mam. ‘But why is he here? The last I saw of him, he was taking ship with my father on the expedition to Sanctuary.’
Saro knelt and pulled aside the torn clothing. ‘Bëte,’ he said softly. He bent his head.
‘Bet?’ Katla frowned.
&
nbsp; ‘Bëte. A great cat. One of the Three. I think she must have done this, for I never saw a cat as large as her, and these clawmarks are huge. Was this man a friend of yours?’
The tears in Katla’s eyes spoke for themselves. She nodded dumbly, wondering what could possibly have taken Urse so far from the arctic seas into which the Long Serpent had sailed, what had become of the rest of the expedition, to her father and her brother.
There was nothing to be done: no ritual or rite that would suffice, and burial was pointless in a region in which the sands shifted day by day. In the end they arranged Urse in a more dignified position, laid stones upon his eyes, and Katla called upon Sur to accept his wandering spirit into his halls, even though the big man had not died at sea or in war.
The last thing she expected was an answering voice.
I will take him, Katla Aransen; but I need you and the sword you bear. Hurry to me! Hurry south!
Katla looked around, bewildered. ‘Did you say something, Saro?’ she said suspiciously.
Saro gazed back at her, curious. ‘No.’
He had clearly heard nothing, either.
Katla closed her eyes. The voice thrummed through her still, vibrating in the bones of her legs, in her ribcage and skull. She remembered that sensation. She shuddered. Perhaps she was losing her mind; perhaps she had lost it long ago.
Striding over to the bay she had been riding, she laid her hand on the fox-headed pommel of the great blade which was slung across the beast’s flank. The metal was strangely hot to the touch, not sun-warmed, but fiery. She mounted thoughtfully. Even after she had relinquished her hold on it her fingers were still tingling minutes later; and soon she found herself unconsciously cradling the arm which the seither had healed. It had begun to pulse and to burn like a reminder of the pyres. The sensation filled her with dread.
Ahead of her, the Red Peak showed on the horizon as a smoke-shrouded spike.