The Pity Stone (Book 3)

by Tim Stead

  He called out to the priest – they only had one in so small a town. “Bolias, open the door! Bolias!”

  It could not have taken more than two minutes for the priest to come, but it seemed an age. Tyrak felt that he aged a year while waiting. The sounds of chaos grew from the town around them, but Seth Yarra himself must have been their protector tonight, because none of the darkling creatures came near.

  The bolts were drawn and the door opened. A face peered out.

  “Tyrak? What…?”

  The priest got no further in his question. Tyrak pushed past him and was followed by a flood of men and women. By now there were about thirty or forty, children clutched or towed as they poured into the temple courtyard.

  “What is the meaning of this, Tyrak?” Bolias demanded when he had recovered from the rush.

  “We are attacked,” Tyrak told him. “Things…”

  “Demons,” another man said. “I saw them, and they were demons.”

  “I saw no magic,” Tyrak said. “But they were not men.”

  The priest looked from one man to the other in disbelief. He went to the door and pulled it open, sticking his head out into the night air. A second later he pulled it back in. “The one god defend us,” he said. “The town is afire.”

  “They are killing people,” Tyrak said. “We must bar the door.”

  The other man nodded. “Yes, we must bar the door.”

  “But what if others come?” the priest asked.

  They looked at each other. Tyrak had seen what these creatures could do. If one of them got into the temple there was no guarantee that they could kill it. He looked at his children.

  “Bar the door,” he said.

  None of them were brave men. None of them were warriors. Even their priest was a master of the rule with no cleanser training.

  The priest helped Tyrak lift the heavy oak bar into place, and he felt better once it settled behind its heavy iron brackets. But now that it was done they all stood and looked at the door, listening to the faint sounds of destruction that penetrated the thick stone walls. It was their neighbours dying, their friends, the people they had grown up with.

  “What are they?” a man asked.

  Bolias looked slightly more uncomfortable that he already did, which was difficult. “I do not know,” he said. They were words he had never heard a priest speak before. But Bolias wasn’t quite defeated. “I have not seen them.”

  “I can describe them well enough,” Tyrak said.

  Something banged on the door. They heard a voice on the other side calling to be let in.

  “Don’t,” said one of the men.

  Tyrak leaned against the door. “Who is it?” he shouted.

  “Minal,” the voice shouted back. “Let us in for pity’s sake!”

  “Don’t open it.”

  Tyrak ignored the man and reached for the bar. The priest stepped forward too, and together they seized the heavy oak beam, but they did not raise it. Two of the other man pushed them aside and held it in place.

  “I’ve known Minal all my life,” Tyrak said. “So have you. We have to let them in.”

  “No,” the man said. “They’ll get in. They’ll kill us all.”

  “It’s our duty to save them if we can,” Bolias said, summoning the full authority of his office. “Stand aside.”

  The confrontation was brought to a sudden end by a scream from beyond the door. Other sounds, more reminiscent of a butchers shop, followed. Finally there was a blow to the door that shook the oak on its hinges. They all jumped back, suddenly glad that the bar had not been lifted.

  A second blow reverberated through the temple, sounding like an axe on the wood. Tyrak wondered how long the door would hold.

  Silence fell. Inside the temple they all stared at the door, waiting for another blow, waiting for it to break. It was the only thing that stood between them and a terrible death, and it was just four inches thick. The silence grew. Tyrak wondered of the thing beyond the door had moved on. Perhaps it had gone to seek easier prey.

  The voice, when it came, shocked them all.

  “Open the door.”

  It was not a human voice. It whistled and clicked, and was delivered in little more than a whisper, toneless, dead.

  “We will not,” the priest replied, his voice loud and full of strength. “Not to a demon. This is the house of Seth Yarra, and you may not enter.”

  “We will enter when we choose,” the whisper said. “Your dead god is less to us than this door, which buys you another day.”

  “You shall not enter,” Bolias shouted back, but there was a tremor in his voice. Tyrak had no doubt that the door would be broken, and he did not think that the sanctity of the temple would hold the demons at bay.

  They were like cattle in a pen, he realised, waiting to be slaughtered.

  Sixty Six – Pascha

  Pascha looked away from the cleanser Kalik. She had not thought to see one of them show compassion, but he had surprised her, and he seemed calmer than she would have believed in the face of all that was happening around him.

  She watched the last dragon descend. This must be Kirrith. It was bigger that the others and glittered in a hundred indeterminate colours, catching sky, the grass, the grey of the wall, and even the brighter colours of the other dragons in its mirror scales. This, she knew, was the one creature here that could destroy her with ease.

  The giant creature swept twice across the killing grounds, its shadow darkening the sky and its wingtips no more than thirty feet above the ground. At the end of each sweep it rose slightly, tilted and turned. Its great head swept from side to side, taking in the two armies, the wall, the table and everyone that sat there. She could feel its power like a second, warmer sun passing overhead.

  It beat its wings once, one massive thump of air that she felt inside her chest, and it stopped above the last unoccupied perch, dropping ten feet straight down. As Kirrith folded its wings, or his wings, though she could not be sure what dragons were, she saw at last that there was someone on his back.

  No there were two. Two men sitting astride the broad scales.

  It was more than a surprise. She had expected Narak. She had planned for Narak. This other man was something unknown, and riding on a dragon’s back he could not be discounted. In spite of that she had to admit that she was curious.

  Kirrith landed was so much bigger than the others – a hawk among chickens. He stretched out his wing and the two men walked down it as though it was a ramp. Pascha knew Narak at once. She knew his walk, the way he carried himself, and she knew which of the two he was. She studied the other.

  He was a giant of a man – a full head taller than Narak and broader at the shoulder. Both men were armed, and both men carried twin blades strapped to their backs. They walked across the killing ground towards the table, and Pascha could see that they were talking, or at least Narak was.

  As they drew closer she could see that Narak’s companion was armoured, and the armour was thick, too thick. No natural man could walk in the weight of armour like that. It did not take a moment for her to draw the obvious conclusion: he was Farheim. It surprised her that Pelion had not mentioned him, because he was none of hers.

  Narak was carrying a small box tucked under one arm. He walked around the table and sat himself in the seat beside Pascha as though he had just come back from eating lunch. He smiled at her.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  The big Farheim sat down opposite among the Seth Yarra, the chair creaking beneath his weight. They shifted nervously away from him. He looked unaccountably cheerful, but still dangerous.

  “And I you,” she said, half an eye on the giant. “Who is your friend?”

  “My travelling companion,” he said, his tone correcting her, “is none other than Leras, the Lord of Dun Vilant.”

  “Dun Vilant? Where is that?” The name meant nothing to her, nor did the place. It was apparent that it meant something to the Seth Yarra, ho
wever. There was a general stirring among them, and new, curious looks at the giant.

  Leras looked her in the eye, but then dropped his head. “I am honoured to meet you, Eran,” he said. His voice was deep and rough, but the respect was genuine. His blue eyes had an almost dog-like quality when he raised them again.

  “How old are you, Leras?” she asked.

  Leras smiled. He had big teeth, big lips. It was a big smile. “To the point,” he said. “I like that. By your reckoning I have lived two thousand and four hundred years and twenty seven more, as near as I can tell.”

  “What is he saying?” Kalik asked. “Who is he and why does he sit among us?”

  Pascha realised that Leras was not speaking Afalel, but some old Avilian dialect. Before she could point this out Leras spoke again, and this time in what must once have been Afalel, or at least its grandfather.

  “I am Leras of Dun Vilant,” he said. “I sit here because, as I have been told, we served the same master.”

  Pascha looked at Narak sharply, but the Wolf God was looking deliberately elsewhere.

  Kalik asked the question. “You serve Seth Yarra?”

  Leras laughed, a belly laugh with an edge of madness. He grinned at Narak. “It is just as you said, Lord Wolf, they have forgotten everything.”

  Kalik bristled. “We follow the book,” he said. “Nothing is forgotten.”

  “Aye, the book,” Leras said, and laughed again. “Tell me this, warrior priest, what do you know of my city?”

  “Dun Vilant? It is the holy city of Seth Yarra.”

  Leras shook his head. “And what of Polantis?” he asked.

  “I do not know a place called Polantis,” Kalik replied. “Or a person of that name.”

  “Dun Vilant was once the city of Eran Seti,” Leras said. “It was destroyed by dragons. Polantis met the same fate, but was once the city of Eran Iarran.”

  Kalik clearly made the connection. He looked at Pascha, knowing that she had also been named Eran by this huge warrior.

  “Seti, Iarran. Are you trying to tell me that Seth Yarra is two gods?”

  A shadow loomed over the table, killing the exchange, and Pascha looked up, startled to see a vast head looming over them. It was Kirrith. It seemed that the huge dragon had stepped down from his plinth without anyone noticing – quite a trick for a beast of his size.

  “You may wish to know,” the dragon said, “that the sun has set in the easternmost parts of the Homeland.”

  The significance of what the dragon said was not immediately apparent to Pascha, and not at all to most gathered at the table. It was Narak that understood.

  “The Bren,” he said.

  Sunset. Night. The Bren were free to do what they wished above the ground and their armies would be unleashed. She simply had not thought of it. The sun would not set here for another two hours, and in those hours night would spread across the Seth Yarra homeland and thousands, perhaps tens of thousand would die.

  Two hours, and the Bren would not come until then. She looked at the slopes of the mountains, the rough grass of the killing ground. No, she decided, they would be early. They would be prepared and waiting like any disciplined army, because the Bren were lacking in imagination, but not discipline. That meant that they were already here, somewhere, hidden beneath the ground.

  But what could she do?

  The Bren would not show themselves in the light. Only when darkness fell…

  She looked up at the blue sky. Well, she could certainly do something about that. She drew on the power. Pascha could not force the sun to set. Not only would it require a monstrous deployment of power, but it would probably destroy them all. Darkness, however, was something else.

  Clouds appeared above them. They were white at first, but as they grew and spread rapidly across the sky they became darker and more threatening, until the firmament roiled with slate grey thunderheads.

  The men and women at the table shifted nervously, looking up at the storm black sky. There was no way that this could be natural. Narak, however, seemed pleased.

  “Clever,” he said. “Do you think they’ll come?”

  “Do you think I’ll give them a choice,” Pascha muttered. She was concentrating on the sky, building a shield against the light as quickly as she could. It was difficult. The day was set dry and clouds needed moisture.

  It took no more than a minute, and while the land was not exactly plunged into night, it was certainly bathed in gloom. It became difficult to make out figures standing on the wall, and the Seth Yarra army faded into a single restless creature.

  Now she needed to know where the Bren were. If the Sirash had been to hand it would have taken a moment. She knew that there were thousands of them here, somewhere. In the Sirash they would have been a beacon, but without it she had to do something more difficult. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out everything, but a voice, Narak’s voice whispered in her ear.

  “You’re losing control, Pascha.”

  She shut him out, silencing the world. She reached with her mind, looking for the particular flavour, the unique colour of the Bren. If she spread herself too thinly she could not tell one creature from another unless she became them all, and there were a hundred thousand men here, a similar number of other creatures flying and crawling, filling the ground below her and the air above, and the Bren would be even more. She did not know if she could be so many things and yet remain herself.

  She fashioned her mind into a lance, sharp and precise. Whatever she touched was revealed, and she probed the ground beneath her. It took time, and she worried about Narak’s words. Losing control of what? The Bren were here. She had only to find them and her plan could proceed.

  She put it out of her mind and focussed on the Bren.

  It took a few minutes to search the rock beneath the killing ground, and she found nothing. She felt a rising panic. Had they come at all? She had assumed that they would come simply because of her challenge, her claim to be the true heir of Pelion. But if they had refused the bait, or even worse had seen through her strategy, then she had trapped herself here while the slaughter went on unabated.

  She pushed the panic aside. There were other places still to search, and she turned to the mountains of the Dragon’s Back. There was rock enough there to hide a hundred armies.

  She found them. When she looked at the mountains they were everywhere. Tunnels lay behind almost every rock face, a thin wall of rock all that remained to be broken. She broke them. One by one she used her power to rip away the stone, to expose the army of the Bren and force them out into what remained of the light.

  Something was shaking her shoulder violently, and she allowed the outside world in again, and opened her eyes.

  For a moment she thought that night had truly fallen, for all she could see was blackness. She heard the rattle of arrows striking something hard.

  You are losing control.

  It was a dragon’s wing she saw, stretched out to protect the parley table from attack, and the wing belonged to Torgaris.

  “The Seth Yarra panicked,” Narak said. “They shot at the gate, and as soon as you pulled down the mountains the Bren attacked them.”

  It was going wrong then. “Couldn’t you stop them?” she snapped.

  “Yes,” Torgaris replied. “By killing them.” She had not expected the dragon to speak. It still shocked her that reason, even wisdom, inhabited such beasts. But Torgaris was right. She was the only one with sufficient power to stop the fighting and not kill them.

  She stood. What to do? The Avilians and Telans arrayed before the gate had not joined in the melee. They had adopted a defensive posture, shields up. The horsemen had brought their mounts to the knee so that they were more easily shielded. Skal, she thought. It would be Skal who had held them in check.

  She threw up a wall of power. No arrow, lance, man or horse could penetrate it, and so the gate and all her allies were safe.

  The Bren had advanced, but were not yet truly
engaged with the Seth Yarra, who in their turn were peppering the night folk with arrows. She still had time to stop it before it became too bloody.

  Pascha wrapped herself in her power and strode out from the protection of the dragon’s wing. She reached up into the lowering clouds and seized the energy that gathered there. She threw down lightning, striking the ground all around the advancing armies, a barrage of light and sound. Broken earth flew up where the lightning struck.

  The Bren turned away from it, incapacitated by the brilliance. The Seth Yarra, in their turn, were stunned by the noise. Pascha had made the moment’s hiatus that she needed. She reached up once more, and the thunder spoke with her voice.