Yulan made no reply. He sank back in his chair and set thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, pinching thoughtfully at the skin there. He stared absently at the ape. The apple had long ago vanished down its gullet; seeds and stem, every little bit of it. After sitting for a long time in quiet contemplation, scratching at its folded legs, it had carefully lowered itself to the floor and wandered into a corner. There it now sat, picking at loose plaster on the wall with a single, hooked finger.
“Should he be doing that?” Drann asked quietly; his attention had evidently been similarly distracted.
Ordeller looked round and growled in displeasure. The ape regarded her with seeming disdain, but it did shuffle a little away from the wall. It wrapped its arms about itself, hunched its shoulders and sat with its back to the assembled humans. Sulking.
“We bore the Emperor,” Ordeller observed.
“Any trouble waiting for us here?” Yulan asked softly. “In Curmen?”
“Not likely,” Ordeller said. “No friends, that’s sure – they’d drop me in the drowning pool in the next valley if they guessed I was one of yours, I expect – but they’re too frit, too ground down to raise a fist against you.”
“They for King or Council?”
“Neither. They’re for being left alone by all the blood-crazed bastards wandering the land. Not meaning any offence to you blood-crazed bastards, of course.”
“I’ll take Hamdan up the road, then,” Yulan said, suddenly resolved.
Since the day he left Towers’ Shadow, it had become a matter of importance to him that he should never act without care, never without a second, and a third, plan to fall back upon if the first turned to dust. It had made him a better captain. No matter how he longed for haste, he would not permit the man who had taught him that lesson to now make him unlearn it. Not with lives to be lost if but a single foot stepped wrong.
“Take a look at Callotec for myself,” he went on. “Three hours?”
Ordeller shrugged. “For me. You two lively boys, riding the way you can? Less.”
Yulan twisted towards Akrana – “We’ll be back before then, but if not, be ready to move at dawn’ – then to Ordeller once more: “You have birds?”
She looked affronted. The rainbow of ribbons in her hair gave a little shiver of indignation.
“Of course. That too is what you pay me for, isn’t it? If I’m working too hard or well for your coin, you be sure to tell me. Wouldn’t want to make the rest look like shirkers.”
“Where are they for, the birds you’ve got?” Yulan asked.
“White Steading, Armadell, Sussadar.”
Again Yulan looked to Akrana.
“Rudran’ll still be at Sussadar, won’t he? That’s the only one close enough to make any odds.”
She glanced upward, towards the black beams criss-crossing the ceiling, recovering memories.
“Rudran and… fifteen or so lancers,” she said at length.
Yulan sucked his teeth.
“Sixteen, I think. It’ll have to do. Send your Sussadar birds, Ordeller. All of them, to be certain. Tell Rudran to come here with all speed. Every man he has to hand. You write out the messages, I’ll put my mark on them before Hamdan and I ride out.”
Part of him hated to do it, though he took care to hide that. It was not something the rest needed to see. Dragging more men into this endeavour went against his every starting intent. But he had to have choices. People died when choices ran out, and he did not mean to let that happen. He might not need Rudran and his lancers – there was still that hope – but if he did, and they were not within reach, that would be when the dying started.
A sudden clearing of a throat drew every eye to Drann, the contract-holder. He shrank a little beneath such sharp attention, but to his credit rallied and managed to get the words out without too heavy a cargo of nervousness.
“Isn’t three hundred a… a few too many? Even for you? Even with another sixteen lancers?”
Yulan said nothing. Akrana snorted.
“No, it is not,” she said, not troubling to conceal her contempt. “We are the Free. All things are possible.”
Yulan and Hamdan rode out while Drann was in the room Ordeller had given him, leaning over a bowl of cold water, scraping the fur of his nascent beard away with a knife. He heard the clatter of their horses’ hoofs in the street outside, a dwindling tattoo beaten out on the cobblestones.
He stared at the flecks of hair floating in the water. In the flickering candlelight they looked like dust cast over the surface. He felt none of the regret he had half expected. As it turned out, from the moment Hamdan had condemned his attempt at a beard, he had lost interest in it.
He was deeply tired, and deeply pained by muscles that riding had somehow, mysteriously, both softened and stiffened. But he knew he could not sleep. Not yet.
He went downstairs, and found nothing and no one but Ordeller’s black ape. It sat squarely in the middle of the table at which the Free had eaten, testing some indistinct stain on the wooden surface with its lips. It looked up when Drann entered, but found him less interesting than the stain. For all its age, it looked a little too big and strong for his comfort. He did not trust its lack of interest in him enough to linger. Instead, he went out into the dusk. Perhaps the air would bring on sleep.
Curmen was quiet. A little way down the street, a woman was shaking out a blanket on her doorstep. His nose told him that someone nearby was roasting a spice he did not recognise. He could hear children shouting, somewhere behind the row of rude houses opposite. It did not amount to much life for a town this size. The people were fearful. Wearied by what they found outside their doors in these times.
Drann stood in the middle of the street. Akrana was out here somewhere. She had shown no interest in finding a room, washing away the day’s dust, with the rest of the Free. Had gone instead, grim-faced, to stalk Curmen’s streets and alleys and keep a roving watch upon the place and its people. Drann could not imagine her ever being at ease.
A soft sound made him look up. High on the roof of the lodging house a trapdoor had opened. From it one, then another, then a third white dove spilled out, brushing the air with wings and splayed tails as they climbed up and away from the town. They turned, the three of them, in a rising spiral up into the darkening sky, then arrowed away, like pale stones loosed from a sling.
Ordeller’s birds, gone to summon more of the Free’s strength. Drann had no idea how far they had to journey. He had never heard of the Sussadar for which they were bound.
“Drann, is it?”
He looked round.
One of Hamdan’s archers stood by the stable’s huge doors. He nodded at Drann and beckoned him over. Drawing closer, Drann realised that the man could not be a great deal older than he was himself. The shortbow and quiver strapped across his back, the sword at his hip, the hard set of his jaw added years to him, though.
“Lebid,” the archer said by way of introduction. “Can I ask a favour of you?”
“I suppose so,” Drann murmured.
“Stand here for me, long enough that I can beg some fodder from Ordeller. Not a morsel’s passed my lips since we got here, and my guts’ll be rising up and throttling me if I don’t feed them soon.”
“I’ve no weapon,” Drann said, feeling inexplicably foolish. “Left my spear up in my room.”
Undeterred, the archer at once slid his sword from its scabbard and proffered its hilt to Drann. Who had never held a sword in his life.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with that,” he said.
“You won’t have to do anything.” There was just a trace of irritation in the man’s voice now. “It’s for show. Trust me, no one’s going to kill you before I get back.”
Drann raised his eyebrows at that, but the archer summoned up a grin.
“Jest! No one’s going to kill you at all. They wouldn’t dare. Just take a few moments of my watch while I hunt down some scraps, that’s all I ask. Is it so muc
h? I’m no good to anyone if I drop down from hunger.”
His own dull weariness could not be unique, Drann knew. For all that they seemed accustomed to it, the Free must be suffering from the demands of the last few days just as he was. He shrugged, and took the sword in his hand. The sensation was so strange and surprising that he paid little heed as the archer trotted towards the lodging house with murmurs of gratitude.
He wondered absently what his father and mother would think, to see him standing here in a distant town, holding such a blade. It would sadden them, he thought, especially his mother. But he could not say precisely why he felt so sure of that.
The snorting of a horse from within the stables distracted him from his reverie. The wide doors stood just a fraction ajar. Stepping closer, he was taken for a moment back to his village, transported by the soft exhalation of the stable. It smelled as only stables did. Straw and dirt; horse sweat, horse dung. A hint of warm dampness. Familiar, to Drann. He had hidden in the horse shed more than once, when fleeing parental wrath or injustice.
As he eased himself between the doors, taking care not to make a sound, he recognised that this was a good deal more than a mere shed. It was almost dark within, but he could see that there were stalls for better than a dozen horses – all now occupied by the Free’s mounts – and old cartwheels resting against the walls, sacks of feed and bales of hay. The roof was higher and wider than any barn he had seen, with ropes hanging in loose-bellied festoons from pulleys and rafters. Somewhere up there, in the deepest shadows, he could hear little birds warbling softly to one another.
The Clamour’s wagon stood in the centre. An indistinct shape that Drann took to be Hestin was curled on the filthy straw beneath it, folded into her green-leaf cloak. Asleep, as best Drann could tell. It was not such a bad place to sleep, he supposed: the warmth, the comforting sounds of horses and birds, the darkness settling in through the plank walls. But an odd choice, when there were beds to be had just a few strides away. Further evidence, as if Drann really required any more, that Hestin was cut from a different cloth than the rest of the Free. She and the Clamour were somehow two parts of a whole, in which the others did not entirely share.
He edged closer to that wagon, and its silent, canvas-shrouded cargo. It was a cage that lurked beneath that cover, the meagre light leaking in showed him. One edge of the canvas had caught on the metal grille beneath, hooked up just a little. It felt like a trap, but if so, it was not the kind that could be avoided, for no one – no one who had dreamed for even a moment of a world beyond village and fields, at least – could refuse a chance to set eyes upon the Clamour, that Permanence which, after perhaps the Bereaved and the Unhomed Host, was the most famous, the most feared, in all the world.
Drann paused, even so. Caution gave a last, delicate restraining flutter as he listened for any sound emerging from that great cage. Not a breath, not a stirring. Hestin was still; the Clamour, it seemed, was still. If he did not look, he would regret his cowardice for the rest of his life.
Close now, he could hear breathing. A toing and froing of air like a sluggish wind stirring lakeside reeds. It was not human breathing; too deep and broad for that. He bent, peering in through the narrow aperture the hitched-up cover had opened.
The darkness within was all but complete. He could make nothing out. There was heat, though. Faint washes of it upon his face, keeping pace with the ebb and flow of that breathing. And a strange, dense scent of… something. Rot, soil, sour air. Some admixture he had never met before, but that was unmistakably animal.
He reached for the edge of the canvas sheet, thinking to lift it just a fraction higher. He noticed that his hand trembled, and let it fall back to his side. Reached instead with the tip of the sword. Holding his breath, he shifted the wagon’s heavy cloak, opened a slightly bigger window into the cage. And looked inside.
Still he could see nothing. Just hints in the blackness. Shapes. He leaned closer.
His eyes sharpened. Learned the shadows. And he saw, dimly, fingers resting upon the grubby floor of the cage. Broad, blunt stubs of fingers, calloused and bloated and blotched; thrice the size of his own. Like lumps of decaying wood. He could not tell whether those fingers bore nails, whether the rest of the hand and arm were as disfigured. As inhuman. His heart was shaking in his chest.
One of the fingers twitched. A hand seized his ankle.
Drann cried out as he lurched away from the wagon. The canvas covering fell back into place. He fell over, thumping down on to straw. The grip upon his leg was loosened, and he scrambled towards the door, stumbling to his feet. He looked back and down and saw Hestin, almost out from under the wagon, staring at him.
He could see her face more clearly than seemed right in that gloom. Her old, creased face from which glared unnervingly bright and transfixing eyes.
“He does not sleep,” she said, her voice rough and thin. “Nor I no more.”
Drann stumbled out into the street, feeling almost sick with alarm. He blundered into Akrana. She was standing there with one hand on the shoulder of the archer who had put Drann here. Lebid looked humble, scolded. He avoided Drann’s frightened gaze. Akrana pushed him away as she prodded Drann’s chest, looming almost a head over him.
“Do you even understand what it is?” she snarled into his face.
“A Permanence,” Drann mumbled. “Everyone knows about Permanences. The Clamour, the Bereaved. The Dembine Stone, the Silent Gyre, the Unhomed Host.”
“You know nothing but names,” Akrana snapped. She was pushing him back. “Nothing worth the knowing. If you did, you would not be sneaking about like some wit-short child, trying to get a look. You would be browning your trews at the thought of having to sleep within a hundred paces of the thing. How old is she?”
“Hestin? I… I don’t know.”
Drann backed into one of the stable doors. His heels bumped against it. The sword fell from his grasp. It rang on the street.
“How old?” Ankara demanded.
“Forty? Fifty?”
“Twenty-four, more or less. That is the price she pays to keep the Clamour from taking the head off every curious idiot like you who wants to feel the breath of a Permanence. More fool her. But fool or not, you will not make mockery of her sacrifice again. If you do, I will cut your stupid head from your stupid shoulders myself.”
10
The Seventeenth Captain Of The Free
Kites stood above the ridge on taut strings. A whole flock of them, immensely high up, no more than smudges against the night sky, trembling upon the wind. They strained against the bonds that anchored them, and Yulan could hear their lines thrumming. As he ran beneath them, weaving his way between the lines and the low cairns from which they rose, it felt as if a host of wide-winged birds was hanging there above him. Watching him.
There was, he knew, a corpse within each of those cairns. The folk of these rocky canyons and hills held the human soul to be principally an expression of the Vernal entelech, as was the wind that coursed about these craggy heights. So they sought to unite the two after death, setting a kite to ride the currents of the sky above each stone-encased corpse. When the string broke and the kite tumbled away on the wind, so too would the soul, returning to the formless substance of the entelech from which it sprang.
It seemed no more foolish, or improbable, than any of the many other notions about such things Yulan had encountered in his travels.
Hamdan ran a little behind him. Just as sure- and soft-footed on the uneven ground, even in this meagre moonlight. Just as steadily untiring. They had left their horses in a hollow on the flank of the long ridge, safely hidden from prying eyes. The beasts needed the rest after the gallop from Curmen, and a horse was in any case no way to come unnoticed upon a hostile camp in such a landscape.
They reached the last of the cairns and kite cords, and the rugged, exposed ridge ahead began to sink towards a confluence of gorges. Down there, on the flat ground, was where Ordeller had told them to exp
ect Callotec and his band. Yulan dropped into a crouch behind a boulder and whispered to Hamdan when the archer joined him.
“I’d have a watcher up here somewhere if I was Callotec.”
Hamdan nodded. “Only a fool’d not.”
“I’ll go on. Take a look.”
Again Hamdan nodded.
“You watch from here,” Yulan murmured. “I run into trouble, save me.”
“Of course.” Hamdan grinned, his teeth catching just a hint of the moon’s pearly white light. “Every time.”
Yulan left him there, amidst the cairns, and went on alone. He did not run now, but crouched low. Stole across the stony ground, passed stealthily from sheltering rock to concealing crevice. The precious wind that blew – he had known it could be trusted as soon as he saw and heard the kites from down below – carried off every slight sound, brushing it out over the bleak, serried folds of land that stretched beyond sight. All he could hear, aside from the wind’s own restless sigh, was the dull murmur of the kite strings behind him.
He sent his breathing and his heart into a steady, slow rhythm. Sent his mind into still concentration. Worked his way methodically closer to whatever awaited him.
“Yulan’s the seventeenth Captain of the Free,” Kerig said, stretching his arms, fingers interlaced, above him. “Best of the lot, some say.”
The act of stretching, and the bend it put into his back, made the Clever cough. He hacked up some phlegm, and wiped it away with the back of his hand. Drann saw, in Wren’s face, the fleeting passage of concern. Kerig smirked, though.
“It’s easing,” he said. “I’ll be back to my best in a day or two.”
Husband and wife sat opposite one another, Kerig with his feet up on a bench, Wren hunched forward over a Land board. Drann sat at an adjoining table. He had not been invited to join the two Clevers at their own, and knew better than to assume a welcome. Especially since he had so angered Akrana. But she was still out there somewhere, haunting Curmen’s streets in the night. Perhaps these two did not yet know of his transgression. Whatever the reason, Kerig was unexpectedly willing to talk.
The Free Page 10