The Pity Stone (Book 3)

by Tim Stead

  “If you walk down the hill you will come to a road,” Pascha said. “If you wait on that road you will be found by a scouting party within the hour.”

  The tall, thin cleanser was not the first to recover, but he was the first to reply because he was the only one who could.

  “How is this possible?” he asked. Now she could detect fear in his voice.

  “It is magic, cleanser,” she said. “Now carry my message. If you are not at Fal Verdan in nine days I will be forced to come looking for you if I am to save any of you at all.”

  Before the echo of the last word had died away she was gone.

  * * * *

  The cleansers remained at the roadside once they had found it. They had no food or water, and no weapons. Fortunately it was not as hot as it might have been, and there was plenty of shade from new green leaves.

  Boran found a stream beyond the road. Kalik let him look for it because they needed water and Boran, who had been a farmer once, explained that there should be water at the foot of any slope in such a wet land as this. They had nothing to carry water in, so they took turns scrambling down through the undergrowth to drink their fill.

  When Kalik’s turn came he found the stream to be little more than a series of puddles linked by tiny cascades over stones. He had to cup his hand and wait until they filled. He let them fill ten times. He counted.

  It was impossible not to think of the red haired woman who had brought them here. Nobody in the home lands had red hair, nor such pale skin. Kalik thought it might be a mark of evil, but he had no proof of that. He was more disturbed by what she had done and what she had said.

  She had brought all of them out of captivity. How, he could not say, except that it was unnatural and against the precepts of the book. Where she had brought them was also a puzzle. She had said that there would be scouts, and so they were in the path of the army, but he did not know if it was in the land they called Telas or elsewhere, or if they marched north or south, so he must wait to see.

  But they were free.

  “Where are we, Kalik?” The echo of his own thoughts came from Harl. Harl was short and thick set, strong, good with a blade, but a little slow witted.

  “I don’t know,” Kalik confessed. There was nothing to see, nothing to help place them. The sun would be in the south, that was all. Everything else was trees.

  “Who was she?” Harl asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kalik said. They were not words that a commander should say too often, and it annoyed him to have to say them. “Perhaps one of their demon gods,” he ventured. “Though I never heard tell of such powers.”

  “Can we fight such creatures?” Harl was becoming a nuisance.

  “Seth Yarra says that we can,” Kalik said.

  “It is not written in the book,” Boran said.

  Kalik looked at his second. Boran was a clever man – one of those who had studied the rule before switching to the cleanser path. Boran knew the book better than any of them. He could not argue the book with Boran.

  “We have the god’s own word,” he countered.

  “The reported word,” Boran said. “Just as we were told there would be no mercy, just as we were told the war would be quickly done.”

  These were points that Kalik could not answer honestly. Boran was right. They had been told that the god himself had spoken these things, that there would be no mercy from the barbarians, that victory would be swift. But Kalik himself, all four of them, had been spared by the one called Narak. He had fought and known his doom. The Wolf was faster and stronger than all of them, and he had watched his men die around him until just these three had stood with him. He had been prepared to die.

  The Wolf had spared them. Now they had been freed. It was inexplicable.

  “Are you saying the god lied?” he asked. It was a dangerous question, designed to shut Boran’s mouth. It didn’t work.

  “Somebody lied, Kalik.”

  “And now you think we can’t beat these barbarians?”

  “Maybe, maybe not, but the war’s going on and on. People are dying.”

  “Barbarians.”

  “If half of what that prison keeper told us was true, then the barbarians and their horses,” he used the Afalel word – they all did now, “are not the only ones dying.”

  Kalik gave up. He was loyal to a fault, but no fool, and these were the same questions he had been asking himself.

  “I have no answers for you, Boran.”

  “I did not think that you did.”

  “Then why…?”

  “The book is the thing,” Boran said. “If it is not of the book then we cannot trust it.”

  Harl spoke. “The book says nothing about horses.”

  “That’s true.” It was Prell, the fourth man, who spoke. Prell was a man of few words, and when he spoke people tended to listen. “Does that mean that the god didn’t know about horses, or perhaps he didn’t mention them because there are none in the home lands?”

  “The god knows everything,” Boran said.

  “Then were we supposed to come here?” Prell asked.

  “Somebody lied,” Boran said again.

  Harl tapped Kalik on the shoulder and pointed. There was movement through the trees and all four men dropped down the bank a few feet and lay still.

  Kalik’s mind was spinning. All this a lie? The war, the dead friends, men burned alive? They would find out soon enough who was telling the truth. If these men now approaching down the road were the van of their army then the red haired woman had spoken the truth. If the stories of the war their gaoler had told them were true then it would be another blow.

  He lay quiet and watched.

  He saw black armour, familiar blades, cloth that cried out its home land origin. They walked in the prescribed pattern, odd and even, left and right down the road. These were indeed scouts of a Seth Yarra army. He waited until the men were close enough to see his face clearly and then he rose from the side of the road.

  “Greetings to you,” he called out. “I have a message for your commander.”

  Sixty One – Pascha

  Everything was running down hill. It was as if Fal Verdan was the lowest point of the world and all things flowed towards it.

  Yesterday King Pridan had arrived with all his army, and he was the last. The Avilian king stayed in Golt, as was the custom, but Duke Quinnial was here, as was Prince Havil with his Dragon Guard and the Berashi army. Cain was here with the Seventh Friend. Hestia and Skal were less than a day’s march to the north and waited for her word to approach the gate.

  Beyond the wall the Seth Yarra also waited. They had come two days ago, a vast army, a sea of men, and flooded the open ground that had once been forest. Her chosen messenger had carried her message faithfully, it seemed, or perhaps they would have come here anyway. She would probably never know.

  There was as yet no sign of Narak or the dragons. She guessed that they would come on the last day of spring. Tomorrow.

  Pascha had spent a lot of time up on her old perch, looking down on the enemy. She had counted them as best she could, and estimated their number at sixty or seventy thousand. It was a force that might have been feared, large enough to take the wall, perhaps. But now they were nothing. She could have walked through their camp and killed all of them and they could not have stopped her, though that was not her intent.

  She was here to save them.

  She was here to save mankind, and the Seth Yarra were men. They had been lied to, misled, deceived, and they had died in their tens of thousand. Yet she did not think they would thank her for this deliverance.

  It was not the army she sought to save, not truly. Somewhere across the sea there was a land peopled with their kin: women and children, mothers and fathers, young and old, all going about their daily business. In a week most of them, millions of them, would be dead. Unless she saved them.

  This was Narak’s cause. She recognised that. It was his purpose in travelling north to seek
out the Dragon Kirrith and The Pity Stone. He meant to use the stone on the Bren, to burden them with guilt over what they intended to do, and that might have worked, but events had overtaken him. Pascha needed no magic stone to tame the Bren.

  The dragons were her only concern.

  Pascha knew the stories. Kirrith had slain Cobran, and Cobran had been the greatest of the god mages in an era when they were at the height of their power. She was no match for Kirrith or any dragon should they choose to attack her, but they were held in check by the stone – the stone that Narak was bringing.

  It was like watching a perfect glass vase fall from a table, knowing that it would shatter, but seeing it whole and perfect still. There was nothing she could do to save it.

  She could feel it coming, the undoing of her grand plan, the destruction of everything, but it was by no means certain. Once again her fate was in Narak’s hands. But now she could redeem herself for all the times she had failed him. She could trust him.

  She could do little else.

  She sat on her perch and watched the soldiers far below. The Seth Yarra were camped, but a thousand sentries manned a makeshift wall around them. She could smell their cooking fires, see them walking about the long straight avenues between their tents, but she could hear nothing from them. They were drowned out by the men in the pass below.

  Fal Verdan had never seen the like of this. Twenty-seven thousand soldiers had turned the camp at the far end into a city. Indeed there were now roads and wooden buildings, and a constant traffic moved between that military metropolis and the wall. Apart from the soldiers there were thousands of others, camp followers, whores, tradesmen, anyone who could benefit from the throng. There were sixteen wine sellers alone.

  What a battle it would be; a hundred thousand men fighting over a wall to decide the fate of Terras. But she could not permit it.

  A moment later the world blinked and she was in her tent, alone. She pulled on a cloak that she did not need against a chill that she did not feel and stepped out into the chaos of Fal Verdan. She walked on the wooden boards that had been laid above the mud, and the throng parted around her. They knew who she was. Men stepped into the mire to be out of her way, they stopped talking and bowed as she passed, lending her a cloak of silence as she walked.

  She stopped at Cain’s tent. The two guards outside bowed and one of them slapped the canvas with the flat of his hand three times. The tent flap was lifted from within.

  “Eran, you are welcome here,” Cain said.

  She stepped inside.

  Cain’s tent was typical Cain. It was not a great deal better appointed than the tents of his men. The only signs of luxury were those introduced by Sheyani – furs on the bed, silver goblets and a silver chased glass jug of wine on the table, a silkwood chest at the foot of the bed and a Durander rug that covered the wooden boards of the floor.

  Sheyani stood when she entered and bowed.

  “We are honoured by your presence, Eran,” she said.

  “Enough formality,” Pascha said. “Is everything ready?”

  Cain nodded, his attention at once on pieces of paper on the table. “As you wished, Eran,” he said. “It was not difficult.”

  “The men know what to do?”

  “They are well prepared. You are certain you can protect them all, Eran?”

  “Of course,” she smiled at Cain. She had disliked him, once, but now she trusted him. She valued his opinion. Cain asked this not because he doubted her, but rather because he worried about his men, and all the others who would be exposed. She understood completely why his men loved him. Cain Arbak was without vanity. He was like a machine, invisible to his own eyes, working tirelessly in the cause of those who served under him, and yet doing his duty to those above. “No harm will come to them,” she reassured him.

  “Then we are ready to end the war,” Cain said.

  “There is one thing that I have not told you, colonel,” Pascha said. “You will have to tell the others.”

  “As you wish.” Cain was alert, listening, his full attention on her.

  “Narak will join us tomorrow,” she said.

  Cain smiled. “But that is good news, Eran,” he said.

  “He comes with friends,” she said, almost stumbling over the last word. It was something that she did not know. Could dragons be friends? Even for Narak?

  “Friends, Eran?” Cain was still smiling, but Sheyani had guessed. She was always quicker than her man at understanding half truths. She had blanched. As far as Pascha could tell she was holding her breath, staring.

  “Dragons,” Pascha said.

  Cain sat down. “Dragons?” he asked. “Narak comes with dragons?”

  “Aye.”

  “Does he command them?”

  “They cannot be commanded,” Sheyani said. “They are beyond it. It will be the end of us all.”

  “I do not think so.” Sheyani’s panic was certainly not unjustified, but it would be unhelpful if it spread. “Narak is somehow linked to them, and he would be dead before he came here with them if they meant to harm us.”

  Cain seemed to accept this. He looked grave, but not overly concerned. Sheyani struggled to control her fear.

  “We must leave,” she said.

  “There is no need,” Pascha tried to reassure her again. “I have spoken with Narak, and their intent is the same as our own. They seek to end the war and prevent the Bren from killing men.”

  “You have spoken with him?” It was a straw, but apparently one that Sheyani was willing to clutch at.

  “He found a way. That is how I know they are coming.”

  “Then they are still bound?” Sheyani asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we may yet survive the day,” she said.

  They talked a while longer. Cain showed Pascha the plans that he had laid out, told her the orders he had given in her name, and she approved it all. Her showpiece was set. Now there were only a few hours of daylight, a night that she would watch through, and then the day, the last day of spring.

  Sixty Two – Tilian

  It was like market day in Bas Erinor, only the roads were poorer and the accommodation was somewhat lacking. When they had arrived it had been chaotic, but slowly the new and fleeting city of Fal Verdan had acquired a sort of military order, and Tilian found that they had named the streets, and learned to navigate them.

  He was most surprised to see that one of them had been named Ghost Street, and that he had been quartered there. It turned out not to be coincidental. He found the rest of his unit, the men who had come up from Bas Erinor, quartered nearby.

  That first night there had been a lot of wine, and Tilian realised how much he had missed them all being together. The two halves, those who had been in the south and those from Latter Fetch, compared notes and battles. They declared it a draw, since neither half of the unit had lost a man and both had been victorious.

  It had been a pleasant night, and not such a pleasant morning after, but Tilian found that his new status, his elevated blood, was useful after all. He was one of the few hundred who was permitted to come and go where he pleased, and he went at once to the wall.

  What he saw there chilled his blood.

  He had never seen so many men gathered together in one place. The Seth Yarra army was overwhelming in size. It dwarfed their own force – more than two to one, he guessed – and the kingdoms had drawn on their levies to manage even this many. Still, the odds were better than the first time they had fought here, and his men were seasoned now. They would make a good showing.

  He was standing on the wall looking out when a hand was laid on his shoulder.

  “Lord Tilian, I am gad to see you here.”

  It was Colonel Arbak, smiling and looking relaxed.

  “My lord…” Tilian half bowed before he remembered that he was now on the same social rung at the colonel, so he saluted instead. It took him a moment to realise that Cain had used the form of address in which they were
equal, rather than his rank.

  “It looks impressive, does it not?” Cain asked.

  “We can beat them,” Tilian said.

  Cain smiled again. “I will tell you a secret, Tilian. We will not lose a single man. There will be no battle here.”

  Tilian must have looked confused. Cain’s smile broadened. “You will see,” he said. “I will arrange a place on the wall for you so that you can witness our victory. The war is over, Tilian, but they have yet to realise it.” And with that he walked away, stopping every few paces to talk to one of the men, sharing a joke, accepting a cup of tea here, a morsel of food there, lifting their spirits by his presence. He was natural and easy with the men. It was a fine thing to see.