DOCTOR CATT SURVEYED the Underprior’s sacrificial dagger, now properly cleaned and mounted. “A most serendipitous addition to the collection,” he observed happily. “And, yes, something of an intriguing provenance should we ever come to turn the old place into a museum, but for now the truth of its acquisition will rest only on our shoulders. Quite where the poor girl acquired Dashimar’s Vengeance I cannot begin to speculate. Far safer in our hands, really.” He looked about him at the varied pieces in the collection and sighed, less with proprietorial contentment than with resignation. “Fishy, did you get the shrouds like I asked?”
“Can’t put the shrouds up until you choose what you’re taking with you,” Doctor Fisher pointed out.
“Ah, well then, Tenet’s Warding Amulet, of course.” Catt touched the brooch at his neck, donned to go help Celestaine against the fugitive priesthood and not yet removed. It lent him such a feeling of security. “I think we’ll want the Endless Satchel and the Bounteous Domicile of Hule, unless you fancy sleeping under the stars like a Forinthi, and I’ll take Fyat’s Malachite Cane and the Ring of Faultless Striding. You should probably grab something offensive as well, insofar as you need anything more than your face and general manner.”
“Staff of Ways will do me,” Fisher decided, striking his quarterstaff on the ground and prompting a glimmer of sparks. “Take some stock you don’t much care for, too. We may have to trade for stuff.”
Catt looked over the varied wonders he and Fisher had brought in, a hobby that had started long before the war but profited greatly from the Kinslayer’s disruptions across the land. So many treasures to be pried from the fingers of the enemy or purchased for mere gold from desperate refugees. And now the war was done, why, the market was only growing more exciting. “I think our recent adventure has left me somewhat jaded by the religious paraphernalia in our possession,” he mused. “I really don’t think the gods are coming back any time soon. Let’s go for Cinnabran’s Skull and the Redecinette and some of the Gnostic incunabula. I don’t see us getting any use out of any of it, so we might as well find an appreciative and remuneratively grateful home for them all.”
Fisher grunted and took up the skull, jawless and yellowed. The gems that had been set in its sockets were long prised away by less discerning thieves than they, but it had once worn the face of one truly touched by the divine. He stared moodily into its shadowy recesses as though hunting out any last spark of godliness. “Sure we won’t need them later?”
Catt shrugged. “You know, I never really liked the idea of gods. So desperately judgmental, so terribly hard to talk your way around, or bribe. Not our type, Fishy, not our type at all.” He looked at the pile of artefacts he had selected. “What do you say: Helambrin’s Mechanical Horses or the Sheep Chariot? I know the sheep will make us the laughing stock of the whole world, but I am so dreadfully prone to saddle sores.”
“Sheep it is,” agreed Fisher. “Now stand back so I can get the shroud up.”
Catt busied himself stowing everything away in the Endless Satchel, which was slightly misnamed, but easily capacious enough for their purposes. By the time he had finished, Fisher was done as well, and all the remaining treasures of their collection seemed just so many cobwebs and shadows. Any thief of average curiosity would be going away disappointed.
The more curious would discover to their cost that the shroud was a hungry thing.
“Sure about this?” Fisher asked him. “Could just send an agent again.”
“I don’t think we have one on the payroll that could take on that woman and her rather striking friends. You saw them plying their trade, Fishy. Lethal, quite lethal.” Catt beamed. “So perhaps they may actually be able to find that little trinket for us and pry it from the hands of whatever monstrous malcontent is currently crouching over it.” He weighed the satchel in his hands and then passed it to Fisher, who slung it over his shoulders with a roll of his eyes.
“Of course, once dear Celestaine has it, I’m sure we can devise a way to part it from her, and I do rather think the Crown of the Kinslayer is going to look pretty above the mantelpiece.”
Chapter Eight
AFTER A DAY and a night on the river, Celestaine came out to watch the sun rise, more out of habit than anything else. Forinthi clan warriors were supposed to be up in the first grey light of dawn. There were far too many songs about bloody sunrises presaging bloodier battles.
Apparently watching the dawn was an Aethani thing too, because Amkulyah was perched atop the narrowboat roof, the highest point he could find, bundled in a cloak against the chill and hugging his knees.
“Kul?” she asked. He hadn’t been the most sociable travelling companion thus far, saying little, staring at everything. The one person he had seemed to genuinely take to was Nedlam, and he spent a lot of time lurking in her shadow.
His expression was taut, his look haunted. Aethani faces looked old, to a human: big eyes dominating gaunt cheeks and thin lips.
“Old habits,” he told her. “Hard to shake.”
“That why you’re up there?”
He shrugged and his flight limbs stretched and fought against the cloak. “We don’t like the water. I remember being taught from the youngest age, don’t go near, don’t fly over. Water gets in your wings and then you’re drowned. Silver linings, don’t you think? I’m far lighter than any human; without my wings, I’d float like a twig. But still I don’t like it.”
Celestaine leant back against the wall of the cabin, listening to the first whistles and flutings of the crew as they stirred. The dawn was as bloody as any saga-wright could wish. “Thanks for going after Heno, back in Cinquetann, by the way. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d stayed out of it. We’ve only just met, and I appreciate it’s not the most auspicious start for us, or something a prince should have to put up with.”
“Pah. What is it, to be a prince? My people are scattered, dying, hopeless. Shall I go to them and ask them for a fine chair and a big hat, like you humans have? Should they give me a parade and pay me a tenth part of the nothing they have?”
She shrugged. “Well, then, you shouldn’t have said you were a prince. It’s a hard thing to just forget.”
“I thought you wouldn’t take me seriously.”
She shrugged, reminding herself how young he was. He would have been a child when his people lost everything. “Anyway, thanks. For helping.”
“It was probably the wrong thing to do.”
“Yes, probably.” She watched the countryside pass by, the night giving ground reluctantly, leaving villages and woods in its wake, passing great blackened swathes of land where the forces of the enemy had made a point, or where their monsters had been let loose. One copse of trees now supported a twisted knot of fungous tendrils, strange vegetable spires jutting high into the air, tipped with bulbous pods. She had no idea if it was the work of the Kinslayer or some desperate plant-wizard or Draedyn. “You’re good with the bow, though. I’ll give you that. Learned it during the war, or was it a pastime of princes in Aethan?”
“I never learned it,” Amkulyah said. “You never saw one of my people loose an arrow?”
“A few, during the war. And yes, they were good, but I assume they just had lots of practice.”
“It’s part of what we are, how we’re made. Pin some wings on a human, make her light as we are, you won’t make her a flier. It’s… it’s seeing the world like us, like birds and dragonflies. It’s… Look, here.” He dropped down from the cabin roof and pressed something into her hand. She looked down at a handful of walnuts.
“It’s walnuts?”
“Throw one, out over the water,” he suggested.
She did so idly, frowning at the waste. Amkulyah’s hand flicked out with a nut of his own and she heard the sharp tak as he struck hers from its course, mid-air.
“Objects in motion, things in flight,” he said. “We just know. Try living in a forest and having wings, if you can’t tell where everything’s going to
be every moment. Try again.”
They wasted a dozen walnuts between them. She tried to fake him out, threw high, threw flat, even skipped a nut three times only to have his cast shatter her champion before it could reach the bank. Before her astounded look he just gave another uncomfortable shrug.
“It’s just something left over from what we were.”
“You’ll get it back. You heard Doctor Catt—making and unmaking, right?”
“If this crown exists. If we can find it. If we can use it.”
“If we can’t, there are wizards who owe me favours. I mean, I cut the Kinslayer’s hand off. That should buy me credit with any archmage you care to name.” She shrugged and went to clean up after her horse, which was down in the hold and not enjoying it much.
THAT EVENING, AS the river took them ever westwards, the Shelliac sang. The land they were passing through was bleak, grim moorland littered with boulders like the bones of giants. The hand of the enemy was more apparent here: abandoned forts held every hill and high ground, most of them riven with the signs of fierce sieges. They saw few people here—the Kinslayer’s occupation had driven them out, and it was too soon for many to have crept back. Monsters, they did see—escapees from the breeding pits or leftovers from old battles. They passed the corpse of a huge, hairy thing like a wolf the size of a cottage, its ribs showing through its tatty pelt and its stomach shrunken into a fist, too vast to find sustenance in this barebones land. Later, a serpent longer than the boat tried to pluck one of the crew from the deck and they held it off with spears until Kul sent an arrow into its eye and drove it away.
West of here was the Unredeemed Lands, where the news of the enemy’s passing might still be a subject for mourning. Celestaine had heard no news, nor had any of the Slayers lingered there after the slaying. The Kinslayer’s armies had been scattered in the wake of his death, but not destroyed. A month was time enough for them to reform and swear vengeance, if that was how it was going to be. Bleakmairn was most likely still in the hands of the Kinslayer’s lieutenants.
But for now, they had the river to themselves and the Shelliac were singing down the sun, half a dozen of them occupied in keeping the boat in trim and the rest just sitting about, their hands making a cascade of complimentary words to their music, which sounded like the wind keening harmoniously through rocks, like birds, like bells. It was as alien as their eyes and their gleaming hard skins, beautiful like a vista, not like things made by human hands.
When they were done, Celestaine tried her own, because according to the stories every Forinthi warrior hero was supposed to go into battle with a harp in one hand. She had a crack at ‘The Stones of Carrabree,’ which was one she’d learned from poor dead Ralas. She remembered it in his soulful tenor, though; her voice was rough and her pitch uncertain, and she gave up in embarrassment after two verses and a chorus. So much for music, then.
But then Heno, who had been smirking at her as usual, took in a deep breath and began to sing. She had never heard him do it before, or ever dreamt that he might. As when he spoke, his voice was rich and deep, chanting a verse without any words she knew that rose and fell like the hills, like the waves. Halfway through each line, Nedlam joined in, harmonising high and grinning as she did so, although the counterpoint struck a melancholy tone. To Celestaine, it seemed they were telling a story of endurance and the inexorable, on and on, each line varying from the last yet always coming back to the same conclusion. It was plainly a song that could go on forever, but after the fifth stanza Heno stopped and looked sidelong at his audience, abruptly deciding the pastime wasn’t befitting his dignity.
“Anyway,” he said vaguely, and waved a hand as though encouraging them to forget it all.
“What was that?” Celestaine asked, nonetheless.
“Work song,” Nedlam filled in. “Takes me back, that does. Surprised you know any, you Heart Takers.”
Heno gave her an arch look. “We all start with a pick in our hands. Some of us get better, though.”
Nedlam snorted, and Celestaine pressed, “But what did it mean? That was in your language, yes?”
“It was in no language,” Heno told her. “No words to our songs, any of them.” He regarded her for a moment, one of those moments when she could read nothing human in his face at all. “We were down in the earth with the Kinslayer, Celest. You had him for ten years. We had him for generations. Songs without words are safer. The wrong words could get you killed.”
A DAY LATER, the Shelliac started preparing for trouble. Many of them put on armour—leather or light mail adjusted from human fit. They put their crossbows and bolt cases out by the pavaise shields, and their old Matriarch came up on deck for the first time and wove a few spells on them, little charms of protection and sharp sight. Amkulyah, who had appointed himself lookout, got up on the cabin roof again, standing to get the best vantage, and scowling when the riverbanks were too forested to keep a good watch.
Seeing this, Nedlam went to get her own gear and stood in the bows like a gurning figurehead, leaning on her iron-studded club. Celestaine found one of the Shelliac not actively preparing for battle and tried to get an idea of what was going on.
Last time we came here: much fighting, his hands explained. Many Yorughan, many monsters beyond the wall. Kinslayer’s death just heard, they don’t believe it, or they don’t care. Many soldiers here fighting over the wall, engines for the siege. Little word comes from the rest, only wounded, always wounded. Probably we take some east with us this time, too.
They saw some plumes of smoke out across the land, which had turned rocky and harsh, scattered with wind-twisted trees. Occasionally there was a palisaded camp, and Celestaine made out a handful of different banners, all of the free folk and one from a Forinthi clan that the Fiddlehead had been feuding with for decades. There was no sign of the armies of the Kinslayer on the march, but all the same, whoever was camped was plainly expecting trouble.
We will stop at the post, the Shelliac told her. Any further, you take yourself there.
She nodded, and they reached their destination before nightfall. It was not the little trading shack the term had led her to expect, but a literal post, a great pillar driven into the riverbed at which they moored.
“What happens now?” she prompted.
They see us here, and they are friends, we hope. They come to trade. Or things are worse, and we hold them off and go back. Shelliac faces were short on expression, but she thought he was afraid.
THEY WATCHED THROUGH the night without incident, but even as dawn crept in, a whistle went up that got everyone awake and on deck. Boats were coming from the west. Celestaine squinted into the gloom, trying to make them out. She reckoned two skiffs, making the best of a brisk westerly breeze to raise sail, and behind them a galley, considerably bigger than the Shelliac’s narrowboat, lurching through the water to the beat of a bank of oars. Closer to, she made out their flags: at first, just a white device on a black field, which made her heart sink a little. Not anything of the Kinslayer’s, but one of the Arvennir warrior orders.
Back before the war, Forinth and Cherivell and most of the other small kingdoms would have described Arven as the great enemy looming in their immediate future. The big eastern nation covered as much ground as any five of its neighbours, and had a habit of going into diplomacy with an army at its back. It was run by a jockeying pack of knightly orders under a figurehead of a king, and every order had its own ambitions and almost complete autonomy should it choose to send its troops across a border. Then the Kinslayer had brought his war, of course. Arven had been slow to join the fight, but in the last years there had been black and white banners on every battlefield, because while nobody much liked the Arvennir in times of peace, it was hard to deny how effective their soldiers were.
The high-water mark of the Kinslayer’s advance had taken his armies into Arven itself, tearing down the castle strongholds of the warrior orders and laying siege to the capital of Athaln. Most said that the s
iege of Athaln had been the turning point of the war. Warriors of all the nations had fought the Kinslayer there, and although the city had been savagely sacked, the Kinslayer had never been able to push further east. His enemies had finally found the needed unity to hold him, and then to turn him back. Celestaine had grim memories of the retreat from Athaln, but that was where the road began that ended with her and the other Slayers bearding the Kinslayer in the heart of his power, in his great fortress of Nydarrow.
Of course, now the war was done, there were sizeable Arvennir forces sitting around on everyone’s doorstep, and the rosy blush of a common cause was starting to ebb away. Nobody knew quite how that was going to go.
The light was good enough, the boats were close enough that she could make out their device now: a lily, because the Arvennir considered themselves sophisticates despite all the fighting they were so good at. Celestaine didn’t know this order in particular, but she doubted it was much different from the rest: harsh discipline, rigid routine, a lot of talk about the gods, the Guardians and Arvennir destiny. The Shelliac were plainly expecting them, though, and not expecting trouble.
The galley backed oars and moored up on the opposite bank, while the two skiffs drew alongside the Shelliac, who were hauling up crates and barrels from the hold. This was a supply run, apparently, because little of the land that had been under the Kinslayer’s shadow for long would grow anything wholesome for a human palate. Celestaine watched the Arvennir, squaring the historical bogeymen with the normal men and women she was seeing. They were sandy-haired, mostly; pale, high-cheekboned and square chinned, not bad looking in a samey sort of way. One of them signed idly with the Shelliac and she read their hands as they talked about the land behind the Iron Wall. Still some fighting, but not like it was, the Arvennir man said. They’re organised now, but the way he made the words didn’t suggest worry.
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