The Pity Stone (Book 3)

by Tim Stead

  “Do you know this area?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, spent time at Lord Penric’s house as a boy. It’s not twenty miles from here.”

  It was easy to forget that Jimmer was nobility. He was a good enough soldier, but an untidy man, and he spoke with a northern accent. He’d have been fostered here, Kayde guessed.

  “Who’s place is that down by those pines?”

  Jimmer scratched his head. “Used to be Bel Arac’s, hardly ever used it, but it went back to the duke when Bel Arac fell. Don’t know after that.”

  Probably no more than a steward and a handful of idle servants, then. Nothing the Seth Yarra would want.

  “Well, it seems like our quarry might be at the house,” he said. “We’ll take midday then go and have a look. The scouts will keep the road.”

  Jimmer nodded. There was no hurry. They had orders not to engage the enemy. Their job was to find it, watch it, and report back. Kayde dismounted and looped his reins over a hitching line a couple of times. He walked to a spot where he could see anything that came from the south and sat down. In a minute Jimmer joined him with a stack of rations balanced on the inside of his shield. He pulled a small flask out of his coat and offered it to Kayde.

  Kayde shook his head. “Not today,” he said. Jimmer put the flask away again. They ate in silence for a while. One of the sergeants came over with a kettle of tea and a brace of cups. They took a cup each. Kayde had chosen the brew himself when the unit had been supplying. It was a fresh tasting tisane with a little mint. He took it with honey and a pinch of salt. He sipped and smacked his lips. Perfect.

  “How do you want to handle it?” Jimmer asked.

  “A couple of men down the road. Careful, though. Better if they’re not seen. The rest of us will hang back, ready to ride if it kicks off.”

  “Can I have the duty, sir?”

  Kayde looked at Jimmer. He hadn’t picked the man for a hero. “Why?”

  Jimmer looked at his hands. “I missed Finchbeak,” he said. “Haven’t so much as seen a Seth Yarra.”

  “They’re not much to look at,” Kayde said. “Just men. But aye, you can have the duty if you like. Cautious, though. Don’t start anything.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  They finished eating and the unit packed up and remounted. It was a little way to the valley, and they rode easy, not pushing the pace.

  When they came to the head of the valley it looked peaceful. One of the scouts was back among the trees and rode out to meet them.

  “Nothing moving, sir,” he said.

  Kayde nodded. “On your way then, lieutenant.”

  Jimmer signalled the scout to ride with him and set off down the road at a slow walk, keeping his eyes open for any movement, his hand on the hilt of his sword. The scout looked tense, too, and rode with his bow across the pommel in front of him, an arrow in his hand.

  The pines made the road dark. They were untrimmed, and the branches swept low, making the ground beneath them darker still. Jimmer could smell them, and he could smell something else, too. There was a hint of smoke in the air. He thought it was wood smoke at first, but there was a hint of sweetness to it, like meat cooking, like meat burning.

  He stopped his horse.

  “Sir?” the scout was beside him at once, his voice little more than a whisper.

  “Pyres,” Jimmer said.

  The scout sniffed the air. “Could be,” he said.

  “You’d think there would be men posted on the road by now,” Jimmer said.

  “Aye,” the scout agreed. “Think there was a fight here?”

  Jimmer shrugged. He tapped his horse with his heels and moved forwards again. The road curved to the right, and Jimmer moved over to the left to give himself the longest view ahead. The view unfurled as they moved on, and the pines gave way to a view across a field to a pond. Jimmer could see a corner of the house, but he couldn’t see the fire or any sign of men moving about. He stopped again, waiting to see if that changed. Better to see from here and not be seen. If they went much closer he would have to dismount and move with greater stealth.

  He heard a cough.

  He and the scout wheeled their horses at the same time. The cough, clear as day, had come from behind them.

  There was a man standing in the road not twenty feet away, bow in hand but not raised. He was a young man, tall, and dressed in greens and browns. They’d ridden through the place he was standing just moments before.

  “Who’re you?” the man said. He spoke Avilian, so not Seth Yarra, then. A forester, by his garb. Jimmer considered if he should answer, but saw no harm in it.

  “Lieutenant Jimmer, Lord Carane’s Regiment,” he replied. “You?”

  “Lieutenant Brodan, Second Seventh Friend, Henn’s Ghosts.”

  Jimmer looked at the man. He knew about Henn’s Ghosts, everyone did, but he’d been told that Captain Henn was down south on the coast. He’d heard stories though, about how they could move without being seen.

  “Thought Henn was down on the coast,” he said.

  “Aye, he is,” the forester replied. “But this is his home.”

  “You seen any Seth Yarra?” Jimmer asked.

  “Some,” Brodan replied.

  “We tracked them in from the other side,” Jimmer said. “In but not out.”

  “That’s because they’re still here.”

  “They in the house?”

  “In the ground.”

  “In the…? You killed them? All?”

  “Two hundred and eighty-seven,” Brodan said. “There’s nowhere between the south village and where you came into the pines that we can’t cover with a bow, and we started shooting as soon as they walked in. They weren’t smart enough or quick enough to get out again.”

  “How many men do you have?”

  “Enough. Come and see.” Brodan walked between the horses, and two more men stepped out of the trees, one from each side, and walked beside him. “You want to send your man back to get your captain?”

  Jimmer nodded to the scout and the man set off back up the road at a canter. Jimmer stepped down from his horse and walked it after the foresters. As they drew clear of the pines he could see the house. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a solid and venerable thing. There was some damage: a trace of fire around a couple of the windows, shutters torn away, broken glass. Mostly it looked sound.

  The pyre was on the other side of the house. They had dug a pit – not a deep one – and piled up the bodies, then stacked brushwood and kindling on top of them. The whole mound was burning sluggishly, brown smoke drifting up until it was caught by a wind above the tops of the pines and scattered. Half a dozen men were standing around the pyre, and a couple more were sitting against the wall of the house sorting through arrows, putting them into different piles depending on what work they needed. The sweet smell of burnt flesh was stronger here.

  To one side there was a pile of weapons. Jimmer saw bows, swords, knives, all Seth Yarra in style. There were hundreds of them. Until he saw the weapons he hadn’t really believed, but no army would abandon its weapons like that. The enemy was dead, and these men had killed them. Yet he still hadn’t seen more than ten of them.

  “Did you lose many men?” he asked.

  Brodan shrugged. “We lost a couple in the north village. They took us by surprise.”

  “You lost two men?”

  “Aye. Good men, too.” Brodan appeared to resent it, but as a soldier Jimmer knew that an exchange of two for the best part of three hundred was a monstrous victory, a legendary triumph. People would sing songs about it.

  The sound of cavalry on the road behind made them turn, and Jimmer watched as Captain Kayde rode down the road with all his force at his back. He raised his arm. The Captain was going to love this, he thought.

  Twenty Six - Pascha

  The goat was a puzzle. Pelion’s perfect little dream of a world had no animals but the goat. She had thought that there were birds. She’d heard them plain enou
gh, and they were still there, but only as noise. In all the time she had been trapped here she had never seen one.

  There were no ants, no flies, no bees to drone among the copious blooms.

  She spent a lot of time alone in the garden, exploring its mysteries. Pelion was company of a sort, but she found his superiority tiresome, and preferred the company of her own thoughts.

  She had quickly discovered that the garden was limited. If she turned her head west and walked she came quite quickly back to the place she had started. There was no more than ten minutes walking in any direction. It healed itself, too. If she dug a hole in the ground or broke off a branch and turned away it was healed when she turned back. That was boring, too. It was so much Pelion’s imagining that she could not change anything except herself.

  In the midst of all this was the goat. It was to all appearances a perfectly ordinary goat, white, yellow eyed, and spent all its time cropping the grass that didn’t need cropping. It had short horns and its coat felt exactly as she thought it should – not that she was in the habit of dealing with goats. She had been city born and city bred, and goats were country things. She’d seen them in markets, of course. She’d eaten them from time to time, but she couldn’t remember ever touching one before. It had a sort of wiry firmness and a solidity that was different from the dogs and other tame animals that she had touched.

  It didn’t seem to be interested in her. When she touched it the yellow eyes rested on her briefly and the goat took a couple of steps away and started eating the grass again, as though it found her mildly annoying.

  The other great mystery was what Pelion did when he was not with her. What could he have been doing here for fifteen hundred years since he had last been seen in the world? She was certain that she would have gone insane. She supposed the goat might be some sort of company. It was a living presence, and she found its simple movements quite comforting. She would sometimes sit close to it for hours, trying to fathom some facet of Pelion’s teaching. Sometimes she would even talk to it. It ignored her, of course.

  Even with Pelion, even with the goat, she was beginning to find the place intolerable. There was no humour, there was no entertainment, and there was nothing to look at but grass, trees and a vast array of flowers that were constantly in bloom. There was nowhere to walk that she had not walked a hundred times. Indeed, there was nothing at all to do but learn.

  So she learned.

  Pelion had told her that they key to magic was talent. Some people had talent, The Talent, but the number was very small – one or two in a generation across the six kingdoms. After talent there came learning. Learning was useless without talent, but it quickly became apparent that talent was of little use without learning. Most people who had the talent could go their whole lives and never know it. It tended to emerge spontaneously in moments of stress or danger, but once out of the box it could not be put away again. Learning enabled you to shape the talent, to bend it to your needs, to make it do useful things. Talent alone was like great strength and no capability, like a soldier who can throw a spear a great distance but is as likely to stick it through his own foot as strike an enemy.

  Pelion was dismissive of Durander magic. He said that they had no talent, little learning and stuck it all together with vaunting ambition and self aggrandisement.

  “So how much talent do I have?” she had asked him. Pelion had declined to reply in any meaningful way, perhaps knowing that he next question might be how much did Pelion himself possess. Sufficient – that was the word he used.

  After talent and learning came will. This was not, apparently, the same as stubbornness, or mulish bloody minded refusal to do something, as Pelion had called it. Pascha had always believed that she had a strong will, and she had said so, but the old man had merely raised an eyebrow. That at least was better than a sneer. It was a we shall see, an oh you think so, do you?

  Pelion insisted that will was a creative force, not an obdurate one. He said that progress trumped stagnation every time, that the exercise of will was pure motion. It gave the lie to the place where he spent his days.

  Pascha sat on the grass close to the goat and closed her eyes. She knew that there was no Sirash here, although it had always been everywhere, but she was certain that there must be something. She knew so much more now. She had absorbed so many of Pelion’s words, his tricks, his knowledge, that she could look with new senses upon the darkness.

  She expanded out of her own mind, reached upwards to the false sky, down into the earth and in every direction, expanding until she filled Pelion’s pocket sized world.

  And there it was.

  She could feel the shape of the thing. Magic rose up in the centre, flowed out and down, and finally came back again, but that was not all. It flowed, too in the opposite direction, and in a ring around the sides, the top, the edges. Magic was not like water, it could move where it willed, where it was willed. There were no currents or eddies, no turbulence when two streams met. It occupied no physical space.

  Now she understood. Before she could have seen the flow and marvelled at it, but now it moved before her like words on a page. It meant something. Now she had learning to match her talent.

  Pascha reached out with her will and began to change things. She was tentative at first. This was real magic, not the toys and constructs that Pelion had allowed her to work with within his private world. This was the real thing. But the joy of creation soon overwhelmed her caution. She made new things, changed old ones, reshaped the magic as she chose.

  She felt a breeze on her skin, and she smiled. There was a sound of crickets, and in the distance there was a roll of thunder. A storm was coming.

  Then there was resistance, another will opposed her own, rebuilding what she had built, changing the world back again. She did not want a fight, and so she let go, opened her eyes.

  Pelion was standing before her, his face a thundercloud, his fists clenched. It was almost twilight, and in the west the sky had blushed pink.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

  “Magic,” she replied.

  The pink in the sky faded, the wind died away and the sun began to crawl back up into the sky – the wrong way. Pascha laughed. This was all so trivial. But then she saw something in his face. It was something beneath the anger, and it told her that the anger was false, it was a front that masked something more troubling : disappointment.

  Pelion wanted a fight.

  She closed her eyes again, and at once began to build. Now she moved quickly, doing as Pelion had done, rebuilding everything she touched, rewriting the words. It was frantic. Every time she build something, Pelion was there restoring it to its original form, but she kept working. She knew that the nature of time was on her side. Time had a desire to pass, things had a desire to change, night to fall, clouds to form.

  She made ground. She felt the breeze again. The light around them dimmed. She was winning! It encouraged her to redouble her efforts. She worked faster, and it became easier, as though she had stepped over the brow of a hill and was now descending. The thunder crashed, now close by, and wind lashed at the trees. Pascha laughed, delighting in the intemperate weather, and as she laughed the rain began to fall, striking her head and face in big, fat, warm drops. She turned her face up to meet them, passing her hand over her hair, brushing it aside. She opened her mouth and allowed the drops to fall on her tongue.

  Salt. It was raining salt water.

  She spat the drops out and heard Pelion laugh.

  “Enough,” he said. “You have made your point, and I have made mine.”

  She opened her eyes again, and the rain faded away, but they still sat in the darkness.

  “You have proven your will,” Pelion said. “You have created. Did you see what I did?”

  “The salt water? I tasted it. I did not see.”

  “Look, I will show you.” And he did, unbinding the magic so that she could see how he had usurped her will, changed the thin
g she was doing into something that it should not be. She was impressed. All the time he had not been opposing her will, but pushing it sideways, corrupting it. That is why she had thought that she was winning. And yet had she not won? It was night and rain, albeit salt rain, had fallen.

  “I can leave,” she said. It was not a question.

  “Yes,” Pelion replied. “But it would be unwise.”

  Pascha bristled. “Why?”

  “It will take a moment to explain,” Pelion said. He sat on the grass beside her, and she noted that the grass was now quite dry. “You are familiar with the Sirash?” he asked. “Of course you are.” He answered the question himself, forestalling her retort. “But you do not really understand what it is.”