by David Hair
‘I know exactly how the likes of you treat the likes of me,’ Tarita told her. ‘I’m just lucky that my days of crawling around at your feet are behind me.’
‘I doubt that. Once a crawler, always a crawler, I find. Just don’t get any ideas that you can take advantage of Waqar’s good nature. I’ll be watching your every move, and I’m nowhere near as nice as he is.’
‘You’re right,’ Tarita said, ‘you’re definitely not as nice as he is.’ They glared at each other, then Tarita said, ‘So, you’re protecting him. I respect that. But you’re wasting your aggression on me: I’m not your enemy, or your rival.’
‘You, a rival?’ she scoffed. ‘I don’t think so.’ She stopped and peered. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’
Tarita touched her left cheek. ‘A necromancy wound. I think it’ll heal – well, I hope so: I’d hate to ruin my incredible beauty.’ She breezed past the other girl before she could reply, sashaying towards the wind-dhou as the rest of the prince’s companions watched her approach with uniformly suspicious expressions.
Then protocol took over: she dropped to her knees, touched her forehead to the dust and waited.
‘Tarita!’ Waqar said, hurrying towards her. ‘Get up, get up – we’re not at court.’ He helped her rise, which made the woman snort irritably. ‘Thank Ahm you escaped!’
‘Can we speak freely?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘Of course – I’ve known Fatima, Luka, Baneet and Tamir all my life.’
‘And the crew?’
Waqar looked surprised. Clearly paranoia was a new game for him. ‘They’re just a random crew,’ he assured her, ‘they had no notice of the change of plan, or why they’re here.’
‘Then let’s just assume at least one is a spy.’ Tarita waved to his friends to join them, ignoring their expressions, and led them well away from the dhou. ‘So this is the situation,’ she told them, enjoying being able to lecture royalty. ‘Last night I was attacked by two women. One was wearing the Heartface mask that one of Sultan Salim’s killers wore. The other was a draug: dead Sakita Mubarak. They cornered me in the Cryptorium of the Ordo Costruo, having lured me there in a way that makes it clear they have infiltrated the Order – but they’ve not tested my scrying since dawn: and necromancy is affected by sunlight.’
Waqar had clearly told them about Sakita already, because his friends all looked angry, not shocked. Waqar had put his head in his hands at her words, but Tarita ploughed on – there was no time for squeamishness. ‘Heartface might be Odessa D’Ark of the Ordo Costruo – but equally, it could have been someone pretending to be her. She tried to kill me after she’d established two things: first, that I didn’t know how to find Jehana, and second, that I know the name of the man who wore the Beak mask in Sagostabad.’
‘Who?’ Waqar asked.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ she replied.
The small skinny one with the owlish eyes – Tamir? – spoke first. ‘We think using Waqar’s blood might lead us to Jehana and Sakita – do you know someone with the right affinities to do that?’
Tarita put her hands on her hips and stuck her chest out a little. ‘If you ask nicely, I’ll do it myself.’
Tamir looked at her sceptically. ‘I tried to call both Jehana and Sakita on the way north using Waqar’s blood and got nothing and I’m a half-blood. You’re what? A breeding-house girl? What do you have that we don’t?’
She liked his lean frame and cheeky-serious look, so she winked and said, ‘I’m a Merozain trainee.’
She watched five jaws drop with considerable satisfaction.
Tamir licked his lips. ‘Ah . . . so . . . Holy Ahm . . .’ Then he regained his composure and looked around the circle. ‘A gnostic call has a longer range than scrying, but it can be refused and you’d never know whether it was actually received. Both Sakita and Jehana could be rejecting contact. But a scrying forces contact. It’s difficult to penetrate wards if the subject doesn’t want to be found, but Tarita as a Merozain might be able to find them, whether they’re willing or no.’
The rest were exchanging worried glances, clearly nervous about discussing their fears before her, so she stepped away and let them huddle together. While she waited, she closed her eyes, listening to the aether. Her wards were untouched: no one was scrying her or seeking contact, and that was both a relief and a worry.
Capolio, why haven’t you called? That Heartface knew his name terrified her.
Then Waqar waved her back into the circle. ‘We accept your offer. I have to find my mother and do what’s required to put her to rest – and I must find my sister. Please, help us. There will be rewards, many rewards, if rewards are required.’
Tarita had never expected to be able to tell a prince that rewards weren’t necessary. ‘Consider this a token of friendship between Kesh and Ja’afar,’ she told him. ‘I’ll need a metal bowl, a map, a compass and some of your blood.’
It took time to position the map; Tamir did that in the end, making devious calculations to ensure it was correctly aligned. Then Fatima – who hadn’t met Tarita’s eyes since her revelation – brought water, and Waqar bled a few drops into it.
He and Jehana weren’t twins, which would have made the spell easier, but they were brother and sister of the same parents. Tarita cast her mind into the spell, using the imprint of Waqar’s blood to seek traces of his sister . . . to no avail.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, ‘but Jehana is beyond my reach.’
She saw the pain, anxiety and frustration on Waqar’s face, but he contained it impressively. They tipped out the water, its efficacy now gone, and tried again, this time scrying for Sakita, which was easier as Tarita had tended Sakita on her death-bed and knew her gnostic trace. The breakthrough came quickly: all the blood in the silver bowl flowed to one edge and Tamir carefully plotted the line on the map.
It ran through Hebusalim.
‘Do we go there now?’ Waqar wondered.
‘They could be anywhere along that line,’ Lukadin pointed out. ‘My suggestion would be to circle the valley, east or west, makes no odds, and take a new reading. Unless they’re on the move, that would give us a more precise position.’
‘Triangulate their position?’ Tamir approved. ‘I agree – but can they sense your scrying?’ he asked Tarita.
‘Ordinary scrying can be sensed and blocked,’ Tarita replied, ‘but this runs deeper. It depends how skilled I am, and how sensitive they are.’
Tamir met her eyes. ‘What do you think, honestly?’
Tarita recalled the casual power of Heartface. ‘Honestly, I doubt we’ve gone undetected.’ Then she winked. ‘You have nice eyes, Skinny. We could be friends.’ Tamir blushed pleasingly.
Waqar frowned. ‘Let’s get on with this. You think they’re shunning the daylight, so let’s make the most of it ourselves. We’ve around six hours left.’
She was beginning to seriously worry about Capolio. He must surely know by now that something was wrong. But there was nothing to do but move on, so she followed Waqar and his friends onto the dhou, sitting awkwardly apart from the close-knit comrades and missing the time in her life when she’d had room for friends. As the dhou rose and swung into the wind, Tamir smiled at her, and that nudged the emptiness inside her just a little.
*
It was mid-afternoon before they found a village that was on their map – which none of them fully trusted – and could take a new reading. They still couldn’t reach Jehana, but scrying for Sakita gave them a new line on the map: one that crossed the first one north of the city, somewhat out of line with their earlier fix. Tarita tried to actually see Sakita, but all she got was darkness.
‘She’s beneath the earth, maybe in a tomb,’ she guessed. ‘Perhaps Heartface has released her?’
‘I hope so,’ Waqar said fervently, as they studied the new line on the map. ‘But according to this new fix, she’s not in Hebusalim any more?’
‘That map’s only marginally more accurate
than a finger-drawing in the sand,’ Tamir muttered. ‘But they could have moved her.’
They came to a hilltop west of the Holy City where the Domus Costruo and the Bekira Dome were silhouetted against the eastern sky. This time the blood ran to the northeast, and the line crossed the earlier fixes north of the intersection point by four or five miles.
‘I think you’re right,’ Tarita said to Tamir, ‘they’re moving her.’
They took the dhou up again, while Tarita fretted, wishing she had a relay-stave, but Waqar had apparently run out. Capolio, she prayed, please, call me!
Her next scrying indicated an emir’s palace on the road north, but they found it empty for the summer, tended only by a small group of servants who claimed to have seen no one that day. The next scrying took them still further north into the setting sun, a full sixty miles from Hebusalim.
‘They must be flying too! I think they’ve sensed us and they’re trying to run.’
‘If they’re running, they fear us,’ Waqar declared. ‘Let’s try scrying again.’
Fatima protested; he’d been bled many times that day and it probably wasn’t helping with the stress he must be under. But he brushed aside their concerns.
Tarita conjured again, misty light forming as the blood swirled in the bowl, and this time the contact was faster and stronger. The sun was gone, but twilight lingered, illuminating the face that appeared in the bloody waters of the scrying bowl: Sakita’s face, not marred by death but smooth-skinned and perfect, like a mask of herself in lacquer. Waqar gasped softly, and the image turned its eyes his way. There was no recognition, no warmth.
A sensation like being slapped by a cold, wet hand made Tarita reel. The image winked out and the blood stopped running up the side of the bowl. But not before they saw the line it made: running northwest.
Tamir voiced the obvious. ‘The only thing that way is the Leviathan Bridge.’
34
Watcher’s Peak
Hereditary Traits
I have my mother’s eyes, and my father’s nose. I have the gnosis, passed down in my blood. I worship Kore as my parents did. But I was not born with my father’s perversions!
TOMAC GRAVIN, DEFENCE TESTIMONY, BRES, 853
Feher Szarvasfeld, Mollachia
Junesse 935
Valdyr was among the first to emerge from the Rahnti Mines, on the south side of Watcher’s Peak. Dragan Zhagy was with him, and Juergan Tirlak. They were all in gloomy spirits – Juergan had met them halfway with news of Tibor Siravhy’s execution. I encouraged that mission, Valdyr reproached himself, over and over. Knowing that they all knew the risks was no consolation.
Dragan Zhagy’s voice dragged him back to the present. ‘Juergan, get to the look-out and see if there are redcloaks in the valley. We’ll send scouting parties south while our main body goes west to the Magas Gorge.’
Right now, Kyrik was guiding the Sydian riders into Magas Gorge, leading horses and cattle along the wet, mossy stone tracks and across perilous fords beneath towering cliffs. The number of things that could go wrong was immense, but the worst of those was to be trapped in the gorge with Rondians on the cliffs.
‘I’ll go with Juergan,’ Valdyr volunteered. ‘I’ve not seen the shape of the land here from up high.’
Juergan seemed to consider Valdyr’s company an honour. The scout led the way up a long goat-track to the nearest watch-point, a spearhead of stone with a difficult approach. At one point the path forked and Valdyr glanced upwards, seeing a silhouette of antlers – but they were old and weathered, a skull nailed to a tree-stump. ‘What’s that?’
‘That’s a marker for the trail to Watcher’s Peak,’ Juergan replied. ‘The summit is above the snowline, except at high summer. They say that when Zlateyr stood on Watcher’s Peak, he could see the entire kingdom.’ He indicated the main trail. ‘But we’re going this way.’
Reaching the watch-point left them breathing hard, but the reward was a wide vista overlooking all of northern Feher Szarvasfeld. They lay panting at the top, careful not to break the silhouette of the horizon as they peered out. The land spread before them was an undulating mass of outcroppings and bare slopes broken by pine and brush thickets, crisscrossed with hundreds of tiny streams that seeped into the porous rock and vanished.
‘How can we ever hope to see Rondian patrols from here?’ Valdyr asked. ‘The ground’s too broken.’
‘The main trail crosses open ground, there,’ Juergan told him, pointing down to a clearing about a mile southeast. ‘Anyone traversing the valley on horseback has to go that way.’ He pointed. ‘There are other places too, where the paths climb out of the tree-line. Just let your eyes run from point to point and you’ll be able to make out anyone who’s there.’ He touched his skull. ‘Mollach knowledge, Prince.’
‘I have a lot to learn, but I have good teachers,’ Valdyr replied. They settled in to watch as the sun meandered towards its zenith. Then a tiny line of dots emerged from the pines and crossed the clearing. Juergan pulled out a metal tube capped with thick glass and peered, then showed Valdyr. ‘It’s a Rondian spyglass, like their windships use,’ he said. ‘Put your eye to the narrow end.’
When Valdyr did as he was did, he sucked in his breath: what had been black spots became a blurred column of red-cloaked riders. He couldn’t pick out faces, but they were legion cavalry, not just scouts, and there were a lot of them.
‘Where does the trail they’re on lead?’
‘Magas Gorge.’
Right where Kyrik’s taking his savages . . . ‘When will they get there?’
‘Day after tomorrow, I reckon: about the same time the Vlpa emerge from the Narrows onto Neplezko Flat. There’s a place there where we’ve carved a climb – we call it the Gazda’s Stair – where you can get a man and a horse up to the eastern cliffs. If these redcloaks reach the top of the Stair while your brother is below, he’ll be in trouble.’ He pointed to a fresh line of riders on the far side of the distant clearing. ‘Look, another column. They’re moving in force.’ Then he stiffened and pointed to three dots in the skies, moving swiftly. ‘Windskiffs!’
Is it just bad luck, or do they know what we’re doing? Valdyr wondered. ‘Stay here, try to estimate their numbers. I’ll go and tell Dragan.’
Valdyr found Dragan with the main body, preparing for the trek west to the Magas and drew him aside to tell him what he and Juergan had seen. ‘How many riders do the Rondians have?’ he asked.
‘A standard legion has two maniples of cavalry,’ Dragan told him. ‘That’s a thousand men.’
‘We only saw a few dozen, but Juergan was still counting them when I left. We saw skiffs too.’
Dragan grimaced. ‘We have two hundred men here, not enough to stop them.’
‘Juergan says if they catch Kyrik below the Narrows, it’ll be a massacre.’
‘Ysh, it could.’ Dragan stared out across the valley. ‘It all depends on how far through the gorge Kyrik’s got. If they can deploy on the cliffs above Neplezko Flat, they could fight, but if the Rondians reach those cliffs first, they’ll be trapped below.’
Valdyr felt the lack of the gnosis more keenly than ever – with it, he could at least have tried to contact Kyrik and warn him. ‘We’ll have to send runners,’ he said.
‘But if the Rondians have skiffs in the air, that will be perilous – a running man is far easier to spot from above. We’ll send men, certainly, but they’ll need to stick to cover and that’ll slow them considerably. I’ll not have my boys risk themselves needlessly for those Sydian riders.’
Valdyr swallowed. ‘My brother is with them.’
‘And he’s a mage – if anyone can get out of a trap, a mage can. The Vitezai Sarkanum was formed by our forefathers to protect the realm, not to be thrown away protecting foreigners. We can harass the Rondians for as long as we like, with or without the Vlpa. Getting them here was a feat, but we must think first of our own kind. You see that, don’t you? Even though your brother doesn’t.’
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Valdyr looked away, face burning.
‘He’s a decent man, Kyrik,’ Dragan went on, ‘but decency is for priests. A tabula player obsessed with protecting all his pieces will lose the game. That’s Kyrik.’ Dragan touched Valdyr’s shoulder. ‘You take after your father more than he does.’
He means it as a compliment, Valdyr reminded himself, though he had few happy memories of Elgren Sarkany. But losing Kyrik, for all their disagreements, would be unendurable. ‘Surely your runners could beat these riders to the gorge?’
‘Lad, it takes three hours just to reach the clearing below, and by then it’ll be dark.’
‘They could run through the night—’
‘Holding torches to light our way, or simply running off cliffs? It’s Darkmoon tomorrow night, my Prince. There’s as good as no moonlight for the next seven nights. I’ll send runners, but their first priority must be to stay alive and uncaptured. Beyond that, your brother and his Sydians are in Kore’s hands.’
*
Magas Gorge, Mollachia
Junesse 935
Kyrik hauled steadily on the reins while panting out calming words to the restive beast. Braced against one rock, his feet planted on another, he tried once again to haul the horse out of the swift water, but the stallion was big-eyed with fright and shuddering at the fierce cold of the mountain river. Then Rothgar Baredge, the big, bearded Stonefolk hunter, added his muscle and together they got the struggling animal up and onto the bank. Kyrik groaned as he sagged against the rock wall.
‘There,’ the hunter panted, ‘told you it weren’t a hard crossing.’
‘Last time I believe your lies,’ Kyrik laughed. Then the stallion nudged him indignantly: it had been through this dozens of times in the past three days and knew the drill by now. ‘Sorry, boy,’ he apologised, pulling out a cloth, still soaked from the last crossing, and rubbed the horse down. If he didn’t get the legs dry, chances were it’d go lame. ‘Poor animal.’