Nothing but Tombs

by Tim Stead

  A pewter mug was placed on the table in front of him by a young girl who smiled and hurried away. He sniffed at the liquid it contained. It wasn’t what he was used to, but he couldn’t say it was unpleasant. He sipped, and was rewarded with a faintly smoky taste, a subtle flavour. It was a little insipid, but quite drinkable.

  He wondered how long the food would take to arrive. As taverns went, this was a boring place. It did, however, teach him a lesson. The dukes might be driven from the city, but the wealthy were still here, and he doubted that many of them would be happy with his populist council. They would fight to preserve their way of life as much as Francis would strive to change that of the ordinary men and women of the city.

  He looked at the painting again. It showed courage, nobility, determination, but completely eliminated the common people. This, the artist said, had been a victory for the titled, for the king. The people of Afael who had fought and died in that ancient war were ignored. For Francis it illustrated everything that was wrong with Afaeli society.

  A plate was set before him, and the serving girl paused to arrange a knife and fork around it, deposit a plate of sliced bread and a linen napkin by its side. He thanked her and she bobbed her head and retreated once more. He looked at the food. It did not resemble any sausage he had ever seen. It looked as though the food had been in a fight with an exceptionally capable swordsman and then drowned in a sort of soup. He prodded a piece with his fork and put it into his mouth.

  The taste was another surprise. It was delicious. He shovelled down another few forkfuls and took a pull of his ale. The barkeep was right. They went well together.

  “Enjoying that are you?”

  He looked up, and it took him all his self-control not to spit his food out. Callista Dalini was standing in front of him.

  “May I join you?” she asked.

  Francis tried to swallow his mouthful and almost choked. He gestured at the chair opposite and nodded.

  She sat. She managed to do it with uncommon grace and Francis finally managed to speak.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said.

  “Hardly,” she smiled at him and he felt condescended to. “Your man was following me half the day, so I thought you’d want to speak. Here I am.”

  He was outclassed. The only strategy he had left was honesty, or a limited version of it.

  “You saved my life,” he said.

  “Did I?”

  “In the council chamber. He could not have missed, but he did.”

  “Luck. Why would you think I had anything to do with it?”

  “I saw you with Torgaris. Unless I am mistaken you are from Col Boran. You are Eran Callista.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a guess.”

  “It is, but I have a small talent that allows me to feel the exercise of power, and I felt it then. Someone made that bolt miss, and I think it was you.”

  “Col Boran did not send me,” she said. It was an admission of sorts, Francis thought, but he already knew who she was.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To discover the truth.”

  “And what have you found?”

  “Corruption, disorder, greed, and a seasoning of idealism.”

  “You would have found the first three in generous amounts while Casraes was king, so we have at least improved a little.”

  “It is true that a weak king is worse than no king, but there is a flaw in your ideas, and you have already found it.”

  “And that is?”

  Callista gestured and a man appeared carrying a glass of wine. He set it down on the table and left. She sipped it deliberately. Francis wondered how many years it had taken her to learn how to behave in a place like this. Born to it, he supposed, raised with servants and a belief that they would always obey. Perhaps that was the secret – if you treat people like inferiors, they would accept it.

  “Could you bribe a king?” she asked.

  “Perhaps, if I were a duke.”

  “A king can unmake a duke and take all he has, if he’s strong enough. Duke’s, most of them, understand this. In general, a good king is good for the common people and a bad king bad for all. Would you agree?”

  “I suppose so, but so few kings are good.”

  “That is, as Pascha would say, a matter of perspective. At present we have good kings in Berash and Telas, and their people enjoy the benefits. Over the centuries there have been more good than bad. The situation in Avilian is peculiar because the king is weak by tradition, so the health of the kingdom depends on the duke.”

  “And by all accounts that will lead to civil war. So what is my error?”

  “Bear with me. Can you bribe the people?”

  “There are too many. Any bribe becomes a true benefit. Look, I see the point you’re trying to make. Every councillor represents many, and yet if he is as poor as they he is as easy to threaten or buy as any other man, yet carries the authority of hundreds, perhaps thousands. But I believe that the good outnumber the bad – as with kings. If the good always outnumber the bad then we are always better off.”

  “And who will ensure that this is so? Remember that it was only by chance that you survived the last council meeting. Your oath was a good idea, but it has made you powerful enemies.”

  “Perhaps there is no perfect method of governance, but I’ll wager that mine is fairer,” Francis said. He took another mouthful of his expensive ale. Callista was smiling again, and he had to admit that she was pretty, and her arguments were clever, even if they were wrong-headed.

  “You do not disappoint, Councillor Gayne,” she said. “I do not disapprove of what you are trying to do, and part of me hopes that you will succeed, but I will not help you.”

  “I did not ask for help. What will you tell them at Col Boran?”

  “Many things. You enjoy good food, you’re clever, idealistic, and that you pose a serious danger to the existing order in Afael.”

  Francis smiled. “I could have no better report.” He looked at his food, which by now was growing cold. “There will be another council meeting in four days,” he said. “Will you be there?”

  “Perhaps,” Callista said. “But I have enjoyed our discussion. We could meet here again in two days if you wish, and speak again.”

  “That would be a great pleasure indeed, Eran,” Francis said.

  She stood, graceful again, with a single sweeping motion, nodded and walked away. Francis shovelled another forkful of his food into his mouth and chewed. He reached for his ale, but found that he had finished it.

  Time to try his theory. Treat them like servants.

  He banged the mug on the table. “Service!”

  A serving girl appeared.

  “Porter, girl,” he said. “And quickly.”

  She bobbed and hurried away. It worked. Her face had been a picture of servitude. Francis was left feeling an odd mixture of triumph and shame.

  27 The Road

  Sheyani was glad of Quinifa and his Wolfen. It was not that Vandermay was openly hostile, but since the small force of Wolfen and archers had gone ahead of them he walked with her less often and excluded her from conversations with his officers. Most of the time she walked alone, or with Amberline, and always with her bodyguard a step or two behind. Sometimes the Wolfen officer would walk with her and they would speak. Much of the time she worried about Cain.

  The horsemen following them on the hills often passed out of sight, but always seemed to reappear just when she believed they had gone for good. She was certain they were Alwain’s scouts, and Vandermay agreed. He’d tried several times to send men ahead and ambush them, but they never seemed to catch the enemy on the path.

  It was late afternoon when they saw the birds, dark shapes circling high above the road ahead. It was an ill omen.

  Sheyani looked back at Quinifa. “Fighting?”

  “Yes, Lady Sheyani. I hope so.”

  She admired his confidence, but didn’t entirely share it. She kne
w that Vandermay would not have missed the signs, and sure enough he soon fell into step beside her, his face grim. He didn’t speak, but waited for her to break the silence. She decided that it would be best to wait, and eventually the colonel gave up.

  “You saw the crows?”

  “Of course.”

  It was Quinifa who spoke next. “A great victory, colonel,” he said.

  Vandermay looked at him as you might look at a madman. “Twenty archers against cavalry?”

  “Twenty archers and five Wolfen,” Quinifa replied. “You will see.”

  “You’ve sent men ahead?”

  “I have.”

  “Then let us go forward and meet them,” Quinifa said.

  They did, walking to the right of the column. Vandermay led, Sheyani and Amberline behind him and Quinifa last with his small contingent of Wolfen.

  Their timing was good. They moved in front of the van just in time to see a dozen of Vandermay’s men jogging back down the road. The colonel halted the column and waited. Sheyani glanced at Quinifa, and she could see that the lieutenant was smiling. She looked at the faces of the scouts. There was no sorrow there. She saw surprise, and one of them was smiling too.

  “Report,” Vandermay said.

  “Evidence of a fight,” the squad leader said. “One of ours dead – buried by the look of it. Maybe thirty to forty of theirs.”

  The colonel stared at the man. “How many?”

  The squad leader shook his head. “Best you see it for yourself, sir. It’s odd. Something about it isn’t right.”

  Vandermay signalled and the column moved forwards again. It wasn’t long before they came to the site of the battle, if it could be called that. There was no smell. The horses and men had not been dead long enough for that, but there were many of them. The column halted again and the colonel walked slowly forwards, examining the dead animals and their riders. Sheyani followed.

  The squad leader was right. There was something very wrong here. Most of the men had been killed by arrows, but the horses were scattered about the road and up into the steep hills as though they had run in panic. There were two still tangled up with each other as though they had collided at full gallop. Some had apparently run into trees, already riderless. Two more seemed to have run flat out into a cliff and broken their necks. Some of the men had been crushed by their own mounts.

  At the roadside there was a mound of earth with a bow and three arrows planted in it.

  Vandermay stopped in the midst of the carnage and looked back at Quinifa.

  “What happened here?” he demanded.

  “A victory,” the Wolfen lieutenant replied. “Do you care how it was achieved?”

  “This was not a military engagement,” Vandermay said. “Did you use some kind of magic?”

  “The Wolfen know no magic, colonel. This was done with wisdom, patience and knowledge.”

  “Explain.”

  Quinifa turned to Sheyani and waited. She had to admit that she was as taken aback as the colonel. She had never seen anything like this before and she, too, was curious. She nodded.

  The lieutenant unhooked a small metal tube from his belt. He unfastened one end and tipped it, allowing a waxy ball about the size of a walnut to roll into his other hand.

  “This is what they used,” he said. “There is a metal ball inside it, and then a layer of… substance, and then a wax coating.” He pulled a sling from his pocket. “And this is the weapon.”

  “You’ve told me nothing,” Vandermay said.

  “I will,” Quinifa assured him. “You see, the Seth Yarra, our forefathers, were afraid of horses. Cavalry were our undoing in every battle.”

  “But you ride them now,” Sheyani said. “As well as any Avilian.”

  “True, but when we became Wolfen that was not so. We still feared them. As Wolfen we rejected everything that was Seth Yarra, and so we embraced the new, we sought it. We decided that, if we feared horses, we would make horses fear us more. What do horses fear, colonel?”

  “Bears? Wolves?”

  “More than that. What drives them to frenzy?”

  “Fire.”

  “Yes, and snakes. We discovered that they hated snakes.”

  “That little wax ball does not contain wolves, bears, snakes or even fire. There is no sign of fire here.”

  “Take a deep breath, Colonel. Tell me what you smell.”

  Vandermay frowned, but did as he was told. Sheyani did the same thing. In truth she had already detected a faint odour, but had dismissed it, as one does in the country. Now she concentrated and the smell was quite distinctive. There was an animal musk to it, and a hint of wood smoke, and something harsh beneath it. For a moment she thought she saw flames, as though the road was burning, and then it was gone.

  “Smoke,” Vandermay said. “And some kind of animal.”

  It was an inadequate description. Sheyani knew what they had done, and if she had not been here, she would not have believed it. There was a drug in the wax ball, a drug that made the horses see things and the smells controlled what they saw. It must work very quickly to be any use in a battle.

  “Does it work on people?” she asked.

  “People are afraid of different things,” Quinifa said. “And, for some, reason can master fear, so no, it works best on horses.”

  “So what does it do?” Vandermay still hadn’t worked it out.

  “It drives the horses mad, colonel,” Sheyani told him. “They see things that are not there.”

  Vandermay turned and looked back at where the wagons brought up the rear of the column. The horses pulling them were shifting about uneasily in their traces. “Will they be all right?” he asked.

  “This long after? Probably, but we have a way of minimising the effect. Cloths dipped in pine resin tied about a horse’s nose will mask most of it. Best walk them through here quickly, though.”

  Vandermay frowned again. He turned to Sheyani. “What would you do as a cavalry commander if your horses became a liability, Lady Sheyani?”

  The answer was obvious. “Leave them and attack on foot, given that I had the numbers.”

  “Let’s hope Alwain’s commander is slow on the uptake, then, or we’re going to lose those men. Can you play something to double the speed of our march?”

  Sheyani looked at Amberline. “We can, but your men won’t be worth a damn after a couple of hours.”

  “Do it,” Vandermay said. “How far to the place where we leave the road?”

  “No more than five miles,” Sheyani said.

  “Then let us be there in an hour.”

  28 Death by Drowning

  High Stone had become a garden of cultivated suspicion. There were armed men in every corridor, every courtyard, and at every doorway. In a way Callan Henn found that comforting. It should be impossible for some attempted murder to go unnoticed, though he had a feeling that the attempt would still take place.

  He had no idea what Dardanel thought. His steward had locked himself in his upper room for hours, claiming to be working on something.

  Callan himself walked about his home with a sense of expectation. He did not see how an Abadonist could strike in broad daylight with so many men ready to pounce on any manifestation, but then he knew nothing of Durander magic. He did not know what such an exotic creature was capable of and was reluctant to raise the subject with Honaria. His wife didn’t like to talk about the abilities she had been so comprehensively denied.

  He walked the circuit of the battlements. His own men held the positions there and he spoke with them. They all seemed alert and keen that he should know it, which was good. Behind the keep itself, between it and the curtain wall, there was a herb garden. It was mostly the province of the kitchen staff, but it was the only green space within High Stone’s walls, and Callan liked to walk there sometimes. There were fruit trees as well. An apple and a pear were espaliered against a south facing wall and an old plum tree shaded a heavy door that led into the castle itself.
There was a seat by the plum, and it was a place that Callan liked to sit when he had something to think about and wished to do so in private.

  He paused on the wall and looked down. He could see movement and hear a voice. No, there were two voices – a man and a woman. Idle curiosity stopped him. He waited to see who it was – perhaps some illicit kitchen affair. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the woman’s voice seemed urgent, the male terse. The conversation stopped and the woman emerged from behind the plum carrying a basket.

  Callan was surprised. It was his wife’s maid, Margalay. She walked across the garden and went through the door that led to the kitchens. Callan waited, but nobody else emerged from the shade of the tree. There were steps down into the garden, and Callan took them, keeping his eyes on the plum. If his wife’s maid was seeing a man, he wanted to know who it was, especially now.

  He stepped off the bottom step and walked across to the tree.

  There was nobody there.

  He could not have missed someone leaving. The only ways out of the garden were the steps up to the wall, the castle door and the door to the kitchens that Margalay had taken. Callan tried the heavy door and found it bolted. The bolts were on the inside. He looked at the walls of the keep that rose above the plum tree. He was certain that they could not be climbed.

  He looked at the ground. It was a gravel pathway, and would hold no impressions of feet. He sniffed the air, but beyond a hint of rosemary there was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Had he imagined it?

  He didn’t think so. The obvious explanation was that Margalay had been talking to an Abadonist, that a window had opened up in the air and they had spoken through it. Even if that seemed obvious, he could see no reason for it. An Abadonist would not need Margalay. She was a servant. She could not transfer her knowledge of the castle to anyone in enough detail for it to be useful. There were other possibilities, of course. Other creatures could come and go as they wished. The god-mage herself, any of the Benetheon gods, but there again he saw no reason for any of them to be talking to Margalay.