The Pity Stone (Book 3)

by Tim Stead

  Pelion glowered, but said nothing. After a moment he turned and walked away.

  A victory indeed. Pascha knew that she could not have held Pelion for ever, but neither could he have held her. She thought that perhaps he would have weakened first. It was the first time that she had felt truly strong in his presence. She knew that he was a shadow of what he had once been, but her power was waxing more quickly than his was waning.

  She wondered if Sheyani would carry her message.

  Thirty Three – Cain

  Cain sat down hard. He’d been afraid, he admitted it. When Pelion had come for them with that glowing staff, he was certain that his days were about to end. Then Passerina had stopped him. Just stopped him. Even through the magical link, whatever it was, Cain had been able to feel the power, raw and hot.

  Sheyani looked shaken, as shaken as Cain felt. She was standing, staring into space.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Sheyani turned round. She looked annoyed as much as anything. Cain couldn’t see fear or surprise any more. “It should not have been her,” she said.

  “Her? You mean Passerina?”

  “It should have been Narak.”

  “You expected Narak?”

  “The Wolf believes. He has always done his duty. He has respected his burden. The Sparrow was the weakest of them all.”

  “And yet…” Cain hadn’t known who or what to expect, but he wasn’t happy that it had turned out to be Passerina. He still felt that she didn’t like him. He’d accepted in his own mind that he wasn’t responsible for the death of Perlaine, and even Narak had got past this, but Passerina still blamed him. Yet he hadn’t sensed hostility.

  “She is the denier,” Sheyani went on as though he had said nothing. “She turned her back on the gods, on her power, on the needs of the art. She was never a friend to us.”

  “And yet it is her. If we are Farheim and she made us so, then she is a god mage. She was with Pelion. Gods and demons damned, Sheyani, she was with Pelion. We saw Pelion! Nobody has seen Pelion for two thousand years except the Benetheon. It is what is.”

  Sheyani looked angry. For a moment he thought that she was going to shout at him, but instead she closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. He waited for two breaths, three, until she lifted them away again. The anger was gone. She looked grave, but there was the hint of a smile there.

  “Never change, Sheshay,” she said. “Promise me that.” She reached out and took his hand.

  “It’s not a thing I can promise,” he said, holding up his other hand, his new minted right hand. “It doesn’t seem to be something I have control over.”

  She sat next to him, leaned against him, but said nothing.

  “Are we going to do as she asked?” Cain said.

  “We must. We cannot disobey a command.”

  “She asked, Sheyani. She didn’t command, and we didn’t agree to do it.”

  Sheyani sat upright again and looked at him. “She is a god mage…”

  “She is Passerina. She has more power, it cannot be denied, but she is still the same woman who stood with us at Fal Verdan. Besides, we have other duties to fulfil. I am commanded to deal with the Seth Yarra, not requested. I shall do that before anything else.”

  Sheyani studied his face for a moment, as though trying to determine if her was serious or not, and then she nodded.

  “Then I will go to Wolfguard alone,” she said.

  “No. I need you. There may be a thousand men behind high walls at this Seth Yarra fort. You are my tactical advantage. Without your pipes it might take a year and another thousand men to take the place.”

  “But…”

  “God mages or no, these men rely on you, and so do I. There’s no telling how many might perish in a naked assault on this position. And how will you get to Wolfguard? It’s the other side of the Dragon’s Back past land held by Seth Yarra. You’d have to pass through the Green Road and travel half a thousand miles, and find a place you’ve never been.”

  “The ring will guide me.” She held up her hand with the wolf’s head ring, Narak’s wedding gift to her. She might be able to do that, Cain thought. She just might.

  “We shall take this place, and then we will go to Wolfguard together,” he said.

  She nodded, a little too quickly, Cain thought, as if this promise was what she had wanted all along.

  “Then we must eat and sleep,” she said. “If we are to make war tomorrow we must be rested.”

  The next morning they broke camp by dawn’s light. There was no sea breeze, and the tents seemed lifeless, submitting meekly to the men who pulled them down and packed them away. Cain was not a superstitious man. He did not believe in omens, but the fact that the wind had abandoned them made him uneasy. The air had a dead feel to it without the smell of the sea and the distant cry of gulls.

  There was a thin mist. It made everything damp, and would not disperse. He knew that the sun would take care if it when it rose high enough, but that would be an hour from now.

  The camp was quickly packed away and they began to march, seven hundred foot soldiers bracketed by cavalry, moving swiftly across the pastures of the coastal plain. Cain sent twenty men ahead. He sent Tilian’s men, and Tilian, to scout out the road, to see what lay before them.

  It was not a long march. They should have made the distance the night before. It took no more than an hour to reach the Seth Yarra fort, but twenty minutes before they reached it Tilian came back.

  He wheeled his mount alongside Cain’s. He looked worried.

  “They’re gone,” he said.

  “Gone?”

  “The fort is there. The Seth Yarra are not. They’ve left.”

  “The fort is empty?”

  “Yes. I rode up to the walls. I shouted. Nothing. There’s a trail heading north. At least a thousand men on foot.”

  Cain carried on riding for a moment. Gone. A thousand men had gathered, built a fort that would have kept them safe for months, then abandoned it. This had to be deception, pure and simple. It was a feint. But where were the men? If a thousand Seth Yarra had headed north then Jidian would have tracked them. But Cain had no way of contacting the eagle god. He could not move to intercept them. He would have to follow.

  For all that he trusted Tilian he decided to see the Seth Yarra fort for himself. It was not that he doubted the enemy were gone. Or perhaps it was. He could not conceive that such a position would be built and then abandoned. He wanted to know how long they had been gone. Could they have caught them if the king had not delayed them by half a day?

  “I will inspect the fort,” he told Tilian.

  In truth it would be useful. As Sheyani had pointed out, he had never seen a Seth Yarra fortification. They threw them up wherever they stopped, it seemed, and yet never near Cain. It would be instructive if he was forced to assault such a position one day. He had no doubt that it would be built according to the book.

  They rode the rest of the way there in silence. Cain was trying to put himself in the Seth Yarra commander’s position. They had landed. They had built a fort. They had abandoned it. Why?

  His only thought was that they had been ordered to do so, but had they withdrawn – been picked up and taken out to sea, which meant they could be anywhere by now – or had they gone inland? The trail that Tilian had spotted suggested they had gone inland. And what lay inland? Just here there was nothing much. It was farming country. There was a lot of woodland which stretched westwards past Golt in patches. It had once been the King’s forest, set aside for his pleasure, but bits of it had been gifted to various lords and villages had been built, fields planted. There would be little hunting of note these days.

  The Seth Yarra fort did not look like it could hold a thousand men. When he saw it Cain was not immediately impressed. It appeared to be no more than a double ditch surrounding a palisade of sharpened tree trunks. It turned out to be a little more sophisticated. The ditches were staked. They were deep en
ough to have gathered water and the water barely hid the stakes. It would have been a difficult, costly place to assault.

  He rode to within thirty paces of the walls. There was no sign of life. No heads looked over the palisade, no alarms were raised. He saw that the gate stood open.

  A trap?

  He left his men on the western side and rode around the fort. A small stream ran along the eastern wall, inducted into the ditch on that side and allowed to escape at the southern end.

  He borrowed a bow from one of the men who rode with him and shot an arrow over the wall. There was no response.

  Back on the western side he picked a handful of men and sent them to try the gate. They rode shields up, expecting arrows, and went single file along the narrow, winding path that traversed the ditches, leading to the gate. Cain watched the first man in the line pause in the gateway, then ride in. The second man followed. The rest waited outside.

  A minute passed.

  A head appeared above the palisade and waved to him. He heard a voice call out in Avilian.

  “Empty!” the shout drifted across the bare ground. “All gone.”

  The rest of the scouting party rode in, and still Cain waited. More heads appeared. Even from this distance he could recognise them. They were his men, and smiling. No trap then.

  He left his men again, and rode with Sheyani and Tilian and a handful more through the gates of the fort. He had to duck down to his horse’s neck going through the gate. It was designed for men on foot.

  Inside the place looked forlorn. There was nothing of any value, but Cain could see half a dozen cold fire sites, a wicker basket with a torn handle lay huddled against the palisade. The ground was beaten flat by the passage of thousands of feet and bare as a threshing floor. There wasn’t even any firewood. It was about as empty as it could possibly be. He called Tilian over.

  “Go and look at those tracks again,” he said. “And look on the south side, too. I want to know how many people came in here, and by what route.”

  Tilian saluted and was gone, Cain saw him ride out towards the main body of men and collect his ghosts.

  “What are you thinking?” Sheyani was at his elbow. He gestured at the compound within the palisade.

  “A thousand people?” he asked. “In here?”

  “No more than five hundred,” she agreed. “And that would be unpleasant.”

  “The Eagle saw four hundred people here, building this place. Time after time he saw four hundred, but what if it wasn’t the same four hundred?”

  He climbed a ladder onto the platform behind the palisade and looked out towards his own men. They had taken the opportunity to rest, but he saw sentries posted.

  “They replaced the men here?” Sheyani asked “Why?”

  “The ships,” Cain said. “Think about it. Imagine it. The Eagle can’t see in the night, and wouldn’t try. Each night a ship comes in, drops off a hundred, two hundred men. They march up to the fort. The same number leaves the fort and marches north, into the woods. By dawn they’re hidden. Jidian can’t see them. There are still four hundred men in the fort, the ship is back out at sea.”

  Sheyani looked out over the landscape. From this small vantage they could both see the patchwork pattern of forest and paddock. It was a pretty landscape, but it looked sinister to Cain.

  “Where does the forest take them?” she asked.

  “North,” he said. “North and west. Bas Erinor.”

  When Tilian came back he reported that men had come up from a small beach nearby, about a thousand of them, and a thousand had departed north, but that the tracks were made on many different days. The last had left four days ago, give or take a day.

  Cain blamed himself. He had grown used to Seth Yarra being stupid. They always seemed to do the most staid things. They never showed a spark of invention. He should have expected something like this sooner or later. They couldn’t all be bound by the book, not for ever.

  There were less than five hundred fighting men in Bas Erinor, and most of them would be in the high city. If Seth Yarra took the gate, any gate, the slaughter would be terrible.

  “We ride at once,” he announced. “We ride hard.”

  “Where do we ride, colonel?” Tilian asked.

  “Bas Erinor,” Cain said. “And we hope its still there when we arrive.”

  Thirty Four – Jerac Fane

  The fire was built high tonight, and Jerac was glad of it. A chill breeze blew out of the north, a wet breeze that brought a night time fog. The damp air seemed to bring the cold in with it, creeping under woollen garments as though they were the thinnest cotton.

  Dawn was on the way, though. Perhaps the sun would drive the fog away and bring a little warmth. He hoped it would.

  He sat at the table in the room over the gate and looked at the incident book, at the entry he had written the previous night. He did not have much of a talent with words. The entry in the book was no more than a bald statement of events. He had written down the words of Hecmar Bolis, merchant’s apprentice of Shalewood, as accurately as he could. He had separated them from his own words so that it would be clear what the witness had said and what had merely been summarised.

  It still made no sense.

  The dead men had been tied to their wagons. They had been tied by their legs only. He tried to imagine a circumstance in which that might happen, in which he would choose to tie men in such a way.

  They had been prisoners, he guessed. Their legs were tied so that they could not escape, and their hands were free so that they could continue to drive their wagons. Why would you do that? Why not kill them men when you captured them and drive the wagons yourself?

  The only things that occurred to him was that their captors did not know how to drive the wagons, which was absurd, or that there were so few of them that they could not spare men to be drovers. That, too, seemed absurd given the number of arrows that Bolis had seen stuck in the bodies. There must have been at least two or three archers to each drover. That was twenty men.

  The horses, too. The bandits had shot the horses full of arrows as though they blamed them in some way for something. It seemed wasteful. It seemed vindictive. Most of all it seemed stupid.

  None of it made sense. He wished that he’d been able to ride out and look at the scene himself. A witness was all very well, but seeing it for yourself, that was better.

  He poured himself a hot tea and glanced out of the window towards the dawn. There was not even a trace of light in the sky, but the fog might hide it until close to the hour. He sipped the tea and closed his eyes to savour the warmth trickling down his throat. He found that he enjoyed simple pleasures again; a hot tea, a warming soup, the sun on his skin, the feel of his muscles working, his joints free from pain. There was a lot to be said for being young.

  It must be close to dawn now.

  He blew out the lamp in the gatehouse, and sure enough there was a faint glow to the east. It was time to be going down. He looked out of the other window briefly, and saw that there were people waiting outside the gate – quite a lot of them – standing in the fog like so many phantoms.

  He buckled on a breastplate, loosed his sword, and went down the stairs.

  Bisalt was waiting with the other men. The ropes were already laid out and strained.

  “Gate ready,” he said. He looked up at the tower for the sign of dawn. It worried him slightly that the fog might be too thick, and he might not see the sign today, he might be late opening the gate. But really, who cared? If he was two or three minutes late there wouldn’t be any fuss.

  There was nobody waiting inside the city this morning. Usually there was a wagon or a messenger on horseback, but today nothing. Who would want to travel on such a miserable morning?

  He felt a spot of rain on his cheek. Well, that was all they needed.

  “Weather could be better,” he said. It was the first time in five days that he’d passed a casual remark to the men he commanded. That had been deliberate. He
saw a couple of the men nod their agreement.

  “True enough, Lieutenant,” Bisalt said.

  And Jerac knew that he’d won. These men who’d picked on him, who’d shown him no respect had changed. They respected him now. They accepted him as their leader. He felt a small surge of elation, but kept himself in check. His grip on them was still fragile. He glanced up at the tower again to see if the hour of dawn had arrived, and there was the faintest hint.