It had the size and form of a small child. Pale, smooth, naked, featureless. An imitation of a human, looking as if it had been shaped from soft white wax. It was sexless and hairless, and lacked a mouth and nostrils. The only break in its skin was where its eyes might have been. There were no eyelids; merely thin slits, such as might have been made by gently pressing a blunt blade into its yielding face, and behind them blank white orbs.
“Kneel him,” Kasuman said.
The Clade warriors pushed the levyman down on to the ground, one of them punching at his neck when he struggled. From the crowd of onlookers there came a rustle, a stir of indignant unease. One or two voices dared to rise in protest. At that, the rage took hold of Callotec once more and he spun on his heel and shrieked out at them.
“Treason! There has ever been but one answer to it. And now you will see that there are worse things than the Free in this world! There is more to fear than a gaggle of brigands, even one that claims the Clamour amongst its number. Greater powers than you contest these days, greater powers give battle; greater histories are being written than a thousand of your lives might sum to, and it is not for the likes of you to choose whether or how to serve.”
Kasuman bent, and whispered into the flat white ear of the Bereaved. His eyes closed. Those of the Bereaved twitched. Still the levyman kneeling before the Permanence cried out for help, his words becoming great choking sobs. Still his captors held him firm, belaboured him with slaps and blows that did little to quell his panic.
Kasuman whispered. The Bereaved trembled. He carefully lifted one of its arms. The fingers of its hand were limply spread. Like white slugs. There were no fingernails. Not a blemish in its pearly skin. Callotec felt an almost ravenous excitement. He clenched his fists at his sides.
Kasuman touched the Permanence’s hand to the top of the levyman’s head, and at that touch a single black tear sprang from the eye of the Bereaved and coursed, too fast, down its face. Dropped to its shoulder and then ran along the arm, out over one of those extended fingers and into the scalp that awaited it.
At once Kasuman lifted the Permanence’s hand away, never once breaking the urgent rhythm of his murmurings. He pressed the Bereaved’s arm back down to its side, eased it backwards, away from its victim. The Clade warriors holding the doomed man backed away smartly, too. He looked up at them, his face contorted by fear. His anguished gaze passed from face to face, and found no succour, no comfort. Callotec looked into his eyes for a brief moment, and smiled.
Pinpricks of blood appeared across the man’s face. A latticework of tendrilous bruises crept across his temples, and down on to his neck. He moaned. A bulb of milky white mucus beaded at the corner of each eye, and swelled and spilled on to his cheek. His lips split, a score of raw wounds opening in but a moment, and he wailed.
Part of Callotec wanted to look away, but he did not. He forced himself to watch, and easily enough found another part of himself to take delirious pleasure in the sight. This, he thought, might be the shape of the kingdom he would found. One where all the timidity that had crippled Crex’s reign was replaced by absolute authority, and the absolute will to enforce it. That was how you stemmed revolts before they took hold.
A hush fell across the onlookers as the dying man curled on the ground. Spasms shook his body. He vomited black bile. He folded his hands over his head, hiding his corrupting face from view. Across the backs of those hands, a forest of pustulent blisters bloomed.
The levyman was making no sound now. He grew limp. Not quite still, for tremors still racked his arms. His scalp was sloughing from the skull beneath, sliding down to the ground. The skin on his hands was curling and peeling back, exposing the already rotting flesh beneath. He died, and as he did so the stench of death spilled out from him and suffused the valley. On all sides men turned away, pressed their hands over nose and mouth. Gagged.
Callotec at last closed his eyes. He covered his own nose. Blinked away tears called up by the astringent stink. It was an extraordinary thing to have witnessed. A wonder.
He was not ready to die yet. His wife had died, with the baby, in childbirth six years ago. Everyone who shared more than the thinnest part of his blood and descent was now dead, or imprisoned. The world and the times had stripped away everything and everyone, and left just him. Alone. The last of his kind and kin.
He would not lie down. He would fight every step of the way to Threetower, if that was what was needed to give him life, and a crown.
“It is regrettable,” Kasuman said softly as the two of them walked to the head of the column, “that we have lived to see the day when the Bereaved must be used against our own people.”
“They are not our people,” Callotec said. “Not any more. Everyone from here to the sea is a traitor, until they bow to their rightful king. The ones who are still alive, after the Hommetic throne has been restored: they will be our people. Only them. Only then.”
22
When Yulan Was Not Yet Captain Of The Free
Wren came and went from wakefulness. She was stretched out on a blanket, head propped up on one of her own saddlebags. Yulan sat beside her, because there was nowhere else he thought he could be more useful.
Now and again, he crossed to the tiny spring beside which they had settled, sopped up some of its waters in a cloth and brushed Wren’s brow with it. When he pressed the back of his hand to her cheek, she still felt hot, but the fever was diminishing slowly. He thought so, anyway. He had no great knowledge or instinct when it came to such things.
His instinct was for more sanguinary business, and that was what occupied his mind as he sat looking into Wren’s pale, troubled face. The means by which he might salvage something from the wreckage of this undertaking. He had an idea how it might be done. Back in Curmen he had been thinking how it would be done. Now, it was might.
Now he must save the Free, as well as Towers’ Shadow. That was what it had come to, the choice he had made while sitting across a rickety little table from Creel of Mondoon far from here. Everything, and everyone, he held dear rested upon the precipice now. His heart shook at the simplicity of it. He had led them all into a storm, which would rage now until its hunger for blood was spent.
He went to wet the cloth again. He held it down in the bitterly cold water for a moment or two, letting it soak up that cooling balm. When he came to Wren, and knelt by her side, he found her eyes open. Looking at him.
“You cannot leave him to the School. To Sullen. You know what will happen.”
“I do. And I know what will happen if we go to war with the School over him. You know. We would lose, in the end. There are too few of us, too far scattered. The School would pay a terrible price, perhaps be destroyed by it, but we would certainly be. You know that. Once it is begun, Sullen would never stop.”
“No. I don’t know it.”
He reached to set the cold cloth to her forehead, but she pushed his hand away. He could feel her weakness in that push, but allowed her to fend him off. It wounded him almost beyond endurance, that small gesture. And perhaps he had earned the wounding.
“There’s another way, Wren,” he said. “The Bereaved. If we have that, we have everything. The School, the Council, everyone would be willing to barter with us then. We hold all the bones in that game.”
“That will take too long. And how will you set hands on the Bereaved? Without Kerig, with fewer swords.”
That deserved no answer less than true, so he gave it.
“I’m not sure yet. But I believe. It’s possible, I promise you. We still have the Clamour.”
She pressed her fingers into her eyes, then ran them over her forehead and into her scalp, smoothing back her hair. Exhausted. Despairing. Of all the things he would have wished to avoid, of all the partings he would have wished to forestall, this was the one he had most feared. He had told them to go to their farm. Now he knew he should have forced them.
“We still have the Clamour,” she murmured in echo of his words. �
�That’s… that’s not a thing to stake everything on. Would you wager your own life – the life of someone you love – on what happens when you open that door, Yulan?”
He looked at her sadly. She was right. The Clamour might as easily ruin them as win them the victory. It was the last arrow in their quiver, to be used when all the rest were shot. As they were now. So he understood her doubt. .
“It’s what we have left, Wren,” he said as gently as he could. “It’s the best chance – the least poor chance – I have to get him back.”
And I want that more than you know, he thought. He would not willingly add to the number of his ghosts. He would set aside almost any other goal, if he could but retrieve Kerig and reunite these two, and send them safely away.
“The best hope for all of us, including Kerig, is to capture the Bereaved. Callotec and Kasuman too, if we can.”
He said it softly, but with conviction. Hoping that she would hear in his voice all the desire that went into those few words. She did, he thought. But even if she heard him clearly, it did not meet her need. He saw that, and could not blame her.
She turned her head silently away from him. Closed her eyes, pressed her lips tight together. Holding it in, all of it, for now.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and rose to his feet.
It would be too hurtful, too blunt, for him to stay there at her side now. He left the wet cloth folded on the blanket beside her hand.
When Yulan was not yet Captain of the Free, he killed a horse riding from Harvekka to White Steading faster, it was afterwards said, than any man had done before. He hated to do it, for the care of horses ran deep in his upbringing and the traditions of his people, but he did it nonetheless.
Yulan was custodian of the Free’s net of eyes and ears and tongues, cast across the kingdom, harvesting knowledge and rumour. It was a responsibility he took seriously, for the Free were fewer than they had been in their days of famous glory but their world had become no less dangerous, no less populated by those who might wish them harm.
Sullen had come to them eight months ago, proved his prodigious martial talents more than once, distinguished himself, even in that short time, as perhaps their finest swordsman. But Yulan had never liked him. The man stank of artifice and affect. Hollow, Yulan’s instincts cried out. His surface a lie, though a convincing, impenetrable one.
He had said as much to Merkent, early on. For all his faith in Yulan, the Captain had found no grounds upon which to send away such a potent sword arm. Especially one who came to them from a past life amongst the corsairs. Trouble was brewing along the tangled, island-fringed coast those pirates plagued. There were said to be five towns full of them on the Mule Isles now. The kingdom would soon move against them, by all accounts, and that might mean profitable work for the Free.
Once the sliver of doubt had entered Yulan’s mind, it festered. Grew. Sullen dressed and carried himself as might a corsair, but his manner struck Yulan as entirely too self-possessed and informed for one of those wild, unschooled pillagers. So Yulan cast his net. Gave the people he paid the chance to earn their coin. Even sent one of them – brave Harvant – out to the Mule Isles, in the guise of an escaped prisoner. Him, he gave a lot more coin, because that was a cruel thing to ask any man to do.
Harvant had been gone for close to three months. Now he had returned. That was why Yulan went to Harvekka. He would have been there sooner, but Hamdan’s son had died, away in the south, and the two of them went together to see to his passing – under the sky, in the beaks of vultures – and to the care of his young widow. So Yulan came to Harvekka a few days late. He would always regret that.
He met Harvant in a seething, stinking drinking cellar near the waterfront. The kind of place where every man, and every woman, looked worth a wager, should a fight break out. No one gave Yulan any trouble. He looked worth a bigger wager than any one of them.
Harvant, on the other hand, looked gaunt and nervous and scarred. Someone had cut a long gash into his cheek, and it had not healed well. He sought no pity, though, and Yulan hid what he felt. He let Harvant speak.
“There was a boy, they said, years ago, who got himself the name Sullen. Wasn’t his birth name. They couldn’t remember that. And he hated being called Sullen, beat some who spoke it half to death. All the way to death, once, they thought. A fighter, anyway. Nasty, which amongst those folk I can only think must mean savage as the worst bloody beast you ever did meet. He wasn’t right, they said.
“But he went away, this lad. Just upped and disappeared, before he was sixteen. Didn’t seem like anyone was sorry for that. And not sight nor a word was had of him after, but for one story I heard. Came through several tongues, so no telling if it’s true or not, but it’d be a funny sort of whisper to set running without something to it.
“Story’s this: a man from the harbour this Sullen grew up in, he was raiding right on the northern edge of the kingdom. Not even sure whether he was inside or outside it, supposedly. After furs, must have been. Not much else to chase up there. Anyway, they got themselves caught out. Ran into Clade swords they weren’t expecting; not many, but enough to set them scuttling back to their ships and away. And he reckoned one of those wearing the blue tunic was Sullen. A few years on him, but Sullen still.”
So Yulan killed a horse, because he knew Sullen for a liar and a pretender. Much worse than that, perhaps, if he was in the service of the School. He rode to White Steading. By rights, Sullen should have arrived there two or three days before, to attend the annual accounting of shares. Almost all of the Free – those of them with a claim on a share, anyway – would be there. Yulan had thought it more important to go to Harvekka and meet Harvant, though he had told no one where or why he was going.
The Free had bought White Steading four captains ago, and made that grand farmhouse, white as chalk, into their stronghold. Its outbuildings had been turned into stables and armouries and dormitories. A stone wall high as a man had been thrown around it, and a wooden palisade and a boggy moat around that. Watchtowers had been erected and spiked pits strewn across the ground before its gate, to make any approach slow and dangerous. Tunnels had been dug, and treasure cellars, that none but a handful knew of.
The farmstead lay beside the wild-watered Fleet River, an impassable torrent of seething rapids at that point. Over that boiling channel, a rope and plank bridge ran from the upper floors of the farmhouse to the low cliffs on the far bank.
The watchers opened the gate for Yulan as he came riding up on his foaming, faltering horse. He leaped from its back in the yard and it fell as he ran from it. He heard its death prophesied in the rattling, snuffling gasping of its breath behind him, but did not look back.
He fought to steady himself as he drew near the door to the barracks. He slowed to a walk, held his arms stiff and still at his sides. Sullen knew he neither trusted nor liked him, but might still be taken unawares if Yulan came to him in seeming calm. Even so, Yulan threw the door open more violently than he had intended. His blood had not cooled quite enough. He pushed his way through the few warriors gathered around the nearest of the cots, ignoring their questions and complaints. There was no Sullen. He asked the men standing there, regarding him with puzzled expressions. They did not know.
He walked out into the yard. The pounding of hammers in the smithy echoed that of his heart, but he strove for clarity. He looked up, and saw Sullen there, on one of the high wooden walkways that connected all the watchtowers to the farmhouse like branches fanning out from a mighty tree trunk. The two of them looked into one another’s eyes, as the sounds and doings of the White Steading carried on around them, oblivious. And Sullen must have seen something there, in Yulan’s gaze. Another regret and guilt: that single, unguarded moment in the eyes that betrayed him. From which all else flowed.
Sullen ran for the doorway that led into the great white house.
“Alarm!’ Yulan shouted as he sprinted. “All to arms! A share of mine to any who takes Sullen!”
The Free, more than any company in the kingdom, knew how to respond to such a call. Coming from Yulan, second only to Merkent himself, it had an instant effect. Weapons clattered. From barracks and smithy and stables, men came rushing out. Yulan was still the first to reach the farmhouse, by some way. He gave himself just a fraction of a heartbeat, in the doorway, to listen for any sound. And he heard it: footsteps, loud on the bare floorboards up above; the clash of blades, the collision of bodies.
He drew both sword and knife, went pounding up the stairs. Akrana was on her knees at the head of them, hand pressed to her side. Blood seeped out between her fingers. She was slumping down already, eyelids fluttering. She said nothing, jabbed her chin down the corridor to show him the way.
At the end of that passage was a wide, near-square hall. The Captain’s quarters were on one side of it; on the other, the door out on to the great wooden balcony from which the footbridge vaulted across the Fleet. Yulan slowed, cautious of the corners and angles that might conceal ambush. He listened. He heard them coming just a moment before he saw them.
Sullen and Merkent tumbled together from the doorway of the Captain’s rooms. They fell heavily, hard enough to split floorboards. Yulan sprang forward, ready to let knife and sword drop and drag Sullen away from Merkent, but Sullen was already rising, springing away from the Free’s captain. Who did not rise to follow him. Who did not reach to stay his retreat.
Sullen bared his teeth at Yulan, his beaded braids swirling as he spun and darted out on to the balcony. Yulan knew he should not hesitate, but he did. He went down on one knee beside Merkent, the man who had taught him more than any other, and earned his respect in a way no other ever had. Merkent’s long grey beard trembled as the last of his life whispered out through it. His stomach was opened, sliced from side to side. His blood made a lake, and sank between the floorboards. His eyes twitched and he was looking at Yulan as he died.
The Free Page 22