by David Hair
More shapes appeared on the battlements and the sound of combat grew. People were dying back there to enable his escape – and although all his reasons to live were lying dead back in the palace, something spurred him to run as if every afreet in Shaitan’s Pit was on his trail.
For all he knew, they were.
Explosions lit up the walls as he made the first alley and dived into the maze of streets, the palace quickly vanishing behind him. At first he ran blindly, barely thinking, then his brain caught up, an avalanche of thoughts overwhelming him and driving him to his knees.
Salim is dead. My brother impersonators . . . my wife . . . my son . . . dear Ahm, you let them take Juset! For a time, his mind went numb under the sheer weight of it all.
The only thing that was clear, when he could think again, was that the world had no place for the impersonator of a murdered ruler.
15
The Vitezai Sarkanum
Magi Lineage
The descendants of the original magi inherited the mage-blood. The purer the bloodline, the greater the mage: do not mistake this for highborn elitism, but a reality of the gnosis.
However the pure-bloods are – probably because of that gnostic purity – notoriously infertile, which has driven the breeding, planned and incidental, of thousands of lower-blood magi lines whose still-substantial prowess holds the empire together.
ANNALS OF PALLAS, 847
Feher Szarvasfeld (White Stag Land), Mollachia
Martrois-Aprafor 935
The miracle of being alive gave the world a divine lustre – even a stony cave reeking of smoke and damp. The fleeting burst of sunlight flickering outside the cave-mouth was the gaze of angels; the wind was the breath of God; birdsong the joy of Life. The food was ambrosia.
We’re not dead!
Kyrik and Valdyr had been here a fortnight or longer, but neither were ready to move on yet. They’d had to heal enough to eat more than broth, but when they could eat solids once more, the hot bread and spicy goulash tasted divine. They weren’t out of danger – Hegikaro Castle was only thirty miles away – but the Rondians didn’t appear to know about the cave, and they were far enough below ground to prevent scrying. Valdyr was asleep, his face still gaunt and drawn, but the brothers were getting stronger with every day.
‘How did you get in without the Delestre soldiers realising?’ Kyrik asked Janik, the hunter who was currently feeding him.
His benefactor grunted and said modestly, ‘It was no great feat, Prince. This is our land. We knows its secrets.’
As the brothers were fading into unknowing, their rescuers had come up from below, silently removing one corner of the floor from beneath, then pulling them down into a lower floor of cells – ‘one that prick Robear don’t know about,’ Janik said with a grin. They’d carried the Sarkanys out the way they came in: through the waste-water outflow from Hegikaro Castle.
‘If we’d known you were there sooner, you’d have been out in no time,’ Janik said now, ‘but we din’t know, not ’til a servant, one of ours, heard you singing that hymn, “On High” – your father’s favourite. Thought it were a ghost.’
‘I don’t even remember that,’ Kyrik admitted, then asked, ‘So I presume those bastard Rondians are hunting us?’
‘We’ve seen skiffs and patrols every day, but they’ll not find us – we crossed the Osiapa seven times to get up here, and the snow’s come down every night since – even their hunting dogs are useless to ’em.’
Kyrik thought about Robear and Sacrista Delestre, and the vile Governor Inoxion. Paruq, he thought, you may decry vengeance, but I’ll have their heads, if it’s in my power. ‘I know I keep thanking you, Janik, and I won’t stop. We owe you everything.’
‘Just remember that when you’re sitting on your father’s throne,’ Janik replied laconically. ‘Meantime, you and your brother getting yourselves better is all the reward we need.’
*
The Sarkanys and their rescuers moved a week later, under cover of night. A fresh fall of deep snow filled the folds in the land, but beneath the trees the ground was largely bare and they made good time. Kyrik’s gnosis was still imprisoned under Sacrista’s Chain-rune, and he had no idea how they’d remove it – but that was a problem for another day.
Over the three-night journey they left the river valley and struck out through the highlands into Feher Szarvasfeld, or White Stag Land. Once they were enclosed on all sides by mountains, and Kyrik doubted anyone but a skiff-borne mage flying immediately overhead could detect them, he and Dragan decided they could risk day-time travel – the nights were dangerous up here, where winter still held the land in its treacherous grip. Only those who understood its secrets could survive this stark, forbidding place where deer bellowed mournfully and wolves howled, where ice encrusted the icethorns, which all but died in winter, only regenerating when the thaws came. That would be soon, but for now the icethorns were like blackened skeletons.
The brothers were still too weak to walk far, so they had to submit to being borne on stretchers. The bearers’ breath steamed in clouds as they hauled Kyrik up yet another slope, towards a dense copse of trees. A few passes behind, Valdyr’s carriers sweated and panted as they hauled their own fur-clad burden. Valdyr’s face was thickly bearded, as was Kyrik’s, and any exposed skin was greased with animal fat. He looked more like a sleeping bear than a man.
Dragan Zhagy and Tibor Siravhy blazed the path ahead of them; the Vitezai had established hidden camps through all the mountains against such times. Mollachia had never been a strongly united kingdom: every castle was its own fiefdom, and the king’s influence was limited by his reach and his ability to lay siege to keeps quite as strong as his own. The Vitezai Sarkanum saw itself as the preserver of the True Way; it traced its history to the Mollachian folk-hero Zlateyr the Archer – but at times it too had been renegade, an outlawed group.
Zlateyr – or Zillitiya, Kyrik thought. I never had a chance to ask Paruq.
The idea that his national hero might have been Sydian, not Andressan, wouldn’t upset him all that much, but as he was pretty sure Dragan, the Gazda, head of the Vitezai Sarkanum, wouldn’t take the notion well, he had no intention of raising it. The Zhagy and Sarkany families went back a long way together; Dragan Zhagy was Kore-father for both brothers, entrusted with their upbringing should their father die.
Our lives are certainly in his hands now . . .
The brothers were set down beneath towering pines, on ground well-sheltered from the snow. The foresters kept the trails clear up here, allowing passage for those who braved the mountains – silver and grain were crucial for the kingdom’s economy, but so too were furs and timber. The mountains were infested with wolves, bears and sabretooths and the weak or careless didn’t last long out here, but the foresters were a hardy breed.
‘Prince Kyrik, Prince Valdyr,’ Tibor Siravhy called softly from ahead on the trail; no one shouted here in the heights where avalanches could take down entire hillsides. ‘Come; see.’ Behind him, Dragan was standing in the lee of an outcropping, gazing back down the valley.
Kyrik accepted big Merkus’ help to get stiffly to his feet and gratefully thanked his bearers, then helped pull Valdyr upright. Together they staggered up to join the Vitezai leaders. Dragan had an air of menace about him: he was like a great, shaggy timber wolf, with leathery skin, lank grey hair and yellow teeth. Beside him, Tibor Siravhy was more like a hound; unusually for a Mollachian, he was clean-shaven, and kept his receding hair cropped short. Everything he did was tidy, efficient and understated. He greeted the Sarkany brothers with a deferential nod, then pointed southwards, down the valley. ‘Rondian legionaries.’
Kyrik squinted and made out a string of dots far below: a century, perhaps: five cohorts of twenty. ‘We were down there only this morning.’ He strained his eyes and picked out a larger shape: a mounted man or woman.
‘Are they scrying us?’ Dragan asked.
‘With the Chain-runes upon us, we ca
n’t tell,’ Kyrik replied.
‘Do the Chain-runes protect you from their scrying?’ Tibor wondered.
Kyrik hadn’t thought of that. ‘Ysh, you’re right; they’ve screwed themselves,’ he said with a grin. ‘They can’t remove the Runes of Chain from a distance, and they can’t penetrate their own spell.’ The four of them shared a rare moment of levity.
‘Then let’s go on,’ Dragan said, then patting Valdyr’s arm, ‘It’s good to see you smile again, Little Draken.’ He turned to Kyrik. ‘More snow is coming. We’re making for the Rahnti Mines, under Watcher’s Peak. They’re well-hidden, and the old tunnels go all the way through the mountain; they come out near Lake Jegto. The Rondians never come there.’
After another hour of climbing, the fugitives were led beneath a slick rock-face curtained by a grille of huge icicles and into a concealed cave mouth. Dragan smiled slyly as he indicated a stack of torches, each wrapped in oil-cloth. He sparked one to life with his tinder-stone, the flames lighting his craggy face, and handed it to Kyrik.
‘Draken’s fire, my Prince. May it spread through our land.’
Valdyr tottered wearily in his brother’s wake as they clambered through the winding, uneven tunnels. The Rahnti Mines had been closed up before he was born, the seam of silver long mined out. The tunnels were harder work than the climb up the mountains; too narrow for stretchers, so the brothers had to walk, though there were many willing hands to aid them.
The past few days had been utterly draining, despite being constantly plied with food. No one recovered swiftly from starvation: muscle and flesh needed time as well as sustenance. Their bodies had been laid to waste like a torched grain-field: Valdyr’s limbs felt hollow and he was hobbling within a few minutes. It took a while to notice that someone had his shoulder.
‘Not long now, then we rest, my Prince,’ said Nilasz, a rascally-looking man with ginger whiskers. ‘You’ve grown tall, but I can manage.’
They came to a large chamber littered with broken mining equipment. A Sacred Heart had been carved into the wall. The brothers were gently helped to sit while others stuck torches into the rusted old wall mountings and doused the rest. They broke out cooking gear as the chamber filled up with men conversing cheerily, as if they hadn’t spent days fighting their way across snow-covered wastes and through deserted mines.
Valdyr let his gaze rove over the men of the Vitezai Sarkanum. It had never been an order of noblemen, not like the Rondian knights; one had to be invited to join, and members kept their participation secret. Their mission was to keep Mollachia true to itself: True to the People. True to Kore. True to the Land. These men had all taken that vow; he half-recognised some from childhood memories: guardsmen of the keep, rangers and foresters. There was no badge, no uniform; only the Gazda’s identity was made known to those that needed to know.
Valdyr accepted some thick broth and strips of dried meat with a smile and leaned against the wall, thankful to not be moving. He met Kyrik’s eyes and nodded; words weren’t required – since the dungeons, even though he had no idea what they’d said to each other, they were brothers again.
And I’m bigger than him now – who’d have ever thought?
‘What are you thinking, Brother?’ Kyrik asked, slurping the hot broth.
‘That it’s good to hear our native tongue again.’
‘It surely is.’ Kyrik puffed out his cheeks wearily. ‘Though I miss Keshi, in truth: there are so many words they have for things we don’t – they can express nuances we can’t in Mollach.’
Valdyr scowled. ‘If we’ve not needed words for those things before, we don’t need them now. Best forget it. We have bigger tasks ahead.’ A land to free from these Rondian thieves.
To his relief, Kyrik nodded in agreement. ‘Ysh, that life is behind me now.’
*
The next days were long and hard. There was no pursuit: Dragan’s scouts reported that the legionaries had come nowhere near the entrance to the mines. But the tunnels weren’t easy and Valdyr grew tired of being a burden.
Nilasz told him to stop apologising. ‘In time you will carry us,’ he said firmly.
Meaning the gnosis, Valdyr thought. They can’t defeat the Rondians without magi so they need Kyrik and me to kill Robear and Sacrista Delestre. Which he’d gladly do, but he doubted it’d be that easy – especially as Kyrik was still Chained and his power remained elusive. That he would never gain the gnosis – it did sometimes happen, Kyrik had admitted – was a dread that haunted him; after all, he’d been Chained all his adult life, long before he’d come into it.
Beneath the earth, day and night no longer had meaning, and when they finally broke out of an iced-up chamber, they had to wrap gauze about their eyes to endure the daylight; though the sun was lost in glowing white clouds, the snow glittered across the wide valley and a distant flat expanse: the frozen Lake Jegto. Lightning played on the eastern heights and thunder rolled distantly. If there were birds here, they were silent.
The lake was still six miles away, but Dragan sent runners ahead, and before long other men returned, leading two ponies for Kyrik and Valdyr. By then they were so exhausted they had to be lashed into the saddle and led onwards. The ride passed for Valdyr in a slow haze, in which a fox-headed man and woman rode on either side of him, silently mocking his weakness.
They arrived at a small camp, just semi-permanent hide tents set on a headland above Jegto, where the lake fed the Magas River. The brothers were helped inside the largest pavilion, where fire-pits burned and the hide walls trapped the heat. Mead and stew were forced down their throats until they finally began to feel alertness return.
‘Those ponies,’ Kyrik said to Tibor, ‘they looked Sydian . . .’
‘Ysh,’ Tibor replied, and jerked a finger. When Valdyr turned, he realised that the two squat figures in the corner of the tent weren’t Mollachs but Sydians, an ancient man and woman, peering at him through narrow steppes eyes. Their grey hair was festooned with animal bones.
‘They’re from the Cuzhym clan, of the Uffrykai Tribe,’ Tibor said. ‘They’re on some kind of pilgrimage; Kore only knows why. And ysh, it was their horses, so maybe you owe them something. Though in a while you might owe them even more.’
Valdyr frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘They claim they’re Sfera – that’s Sydian magi – and that they can free your magic.’ Tibor shrugged. ‘They’ve done no harm here, and healed some of our injured brothers.’
‘Why would they help us?’
‘Who knows? No doubt it’ll come with a price.’
Doesn’t everything? Valdyr reflected.
*
Kyrik and Valdyr were taken to meet the Sydian pilgrims the next morning, after a good night’s sleep. The two old steppes-folk had their own pavilion, a small hide tent with faded markings similar to those they’d seen among the Vlpa. The brothers crawled inside as bidden and found the two ancients sitting cross-legged and draped in furs.
‘Come in, come in,’ they said in good Mollach. The old man climbed out from under his furs, and Kyrik was slightly alarmed to see that he was naked, his skin painted with lines and circles. His skin was leathery, his limbs skinny, but his belly was plump and his eyes were wolf-yellow. ‘Disrobe, then lie down,’ he growled.
‘Ysh, lie down,’ the women rasped. She was also naked, and of similar build.
Kyrik sensed care here, and trust. ‘We’re in their hands, Val,’ he whispered. ‘Let them do their work.’ He started undressing carefully, leading the way.
Valdyr complied with a prudish look, and they lay down, side by side. The woman leered and cackled, but it sounded like harmless good humour. She came to kneel by Kyrik, while her – husband? brother? cousin? – knelt beside Valdyr. Each had a small cup of milky fluid that tasted of chalky mud. Opium, Kyrik recognised; he didn’t care for the stuff, but he gave Valdyr a reassuring smile and drained it in one swallow.
The Sydian ancients chanted over them, and he wanted to berat
e them: The gnosis isn’t like this – it’s knowledge, it’s trained and precise, not your strange babble and painted runes. But his tongue was too clumsy for speech. His body went numb and his thoughts scrambled, and that was his last rational moment for some time. He floated into nothing . . .
Scent returned: a rancid, earthy smell, like a woman’s cleft, a powerful, fecund odour that reminded him of the breeding-houses. Then feeling returned to his toes, like a fire had been lit beneath them, and he began to sweat in rivulets as the heat spread. Then came taste, a sweet-and-sour berry tang that filled his mouth. The old woman swayed into view, calling to her gods: a litany of ancient names long-forgotten beyond the steppes. Her sagging breasts filled his sight and in his semi-dreamlike state, they repelled and fascinated him. Beside him, Valdyr was babbling in Keshi, screaming a name Kyrik didn’t know; his black hair was plastered to his skull and his whole frame was shaking, and all the while a pressure was building, an all-over scratching and tearing, as if these aged Sfera magi had dug their fingernails into his skin and were slowly peeling it away. A burning smell filled his nostrils and seared his throat, then the woman kissed his forehead and numbness spread, an agonising balm like ice. A web of light flashed before his eyes. For a moment he saw piercing grey eyes – Sacrista Delestre – then they were gone and so was the web, and he felt an incredible feeling of completion.
Beside him, Valdyr moaned and he turned his head, regarding his brother as their eyes met. Then Kyrik raised his hand and kindled blue light, the faintest wisp of it.
Ysh . . . I’m back! It felt momentous, a giant step back toward reclaiming his world.
*
When the web about him tore, Valdyr felt a stunning moment of clarity. Can I—?
He was standing atop an icy peak, but there was a fire-pit, cunningly set in a dip, and it was burning. Four figures were arrayed about it, dark shapes frozen sitting up in the snow. Empty eyes turned his way. The moon broke through the clouds, catching a white stag in its beam.