Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “The Kinslayer hated it, of course,” she said hollowly. “He took it, and for years he worked towards some punishment for all that beauty. And then he got his Heart Takers together, and his dragons and all the rest, and worked this magic, start the fire of forever in every living thing of Hathel Vale.”

  “But didn’t people live…?”

  Celestaine looked from his appalled face to the bright horizon. “Not people, exactly. People could have fled.”

  THE NEXT DAY they passed about the edge of Hathel Vale. Long before they got there, they were travelling under the smoke that blanketed the sky, making her wonder, How is there smoke, even? What burns, when nothing is consumed? It was as though the black-grey pall was made of pure misery, of which there was an inexhaustible supply.

  Before they reached the edge of Hathel they heard the inhabitants, too. The people of Hathel had not been human or Oerni or any of the mortal races. They had been bound to the trees, spirits that took human-like form but whose hearts were tied to the vale and its forest. They had been things of grace and beauty, Celestaine remembered, seeming to drift above the ground or the water, talking to one another in voices like the music of streams and breezes. More than one young man or woman had lost their heart to them, pining beneath the verdant canopy for an entity centuries old that could never quite love a human back.

  Their screams rose from the midst of the burning wood in an unholy chorus. Celestaine, who had been ready for it, felt the sound tunnel into her innards and twist them. Ralas was very pale, slipping from the saddle to lead the lunnox, the fires reflected in his eyes. Hathel Vale was an inferno, the heat washing from it in waves, the air about it dancing with embers. Every tree roared and cracked, a leafless blackened skeleton, and yet never guttering even for an instant. And between the trunks ran the dryads of Hathel, not graceful now, not beautiful, save in the way that fire dancing can be beautiful. Every cracked, charred face was contorted, all other features shoved aside to make room for that great open maw so they could wail and shriek. They beat at their burning trees with charcoal fists. They raised candle fingers to the roiling smoke of the sky. Over and over; over and over.

  Amkulyah’s round eyes were so wide Celestaine could see the whole of Hathel reflected in each one.

  “Why not this?” he asked. “Why not be a hero for this, rather than for my people? I would have mended this, if I could.”

  “I just… Once we have the crown, maybe we can mend this too. Who knows?” And yet she knew the greatest magi and sages had applied their minds to the Hathel, just as they had to the silence of the gods. Not one had come forward to say, “Oh, if only we had some great artefact of making…” The Kinslayer had wrought many things that nobody could undo. At his height, he had commanded powers even Roherich hadn’t understood, arts the other Guardians could barely guess at.

  THE DORHAMBRI, BACK before the Kinslayer’s war, had been a bustling mining town, complete with a local duke who was, if not a saint, then at least relatively content with his considerable wealth. There had been rows of miners’ cottages beside the foundry, and a knot of tradesmen and a handful of small temples at the other end of town. Or that was Ralas’s claim, as Celestaine had never had cause to go there.

  The Kinslayer had little use for pleasant little cottages, even less for a benevolently idle duke. What he had a use for was the iron beneath, both regular and magical. He had lusted after that rare, pure metal, but as with so many other things his desire to hurt had got in the way even of his own ambitions. Hence, alongside many of the original mining families and some prisoners of war, he had conscripted practically the entire Aethani race and buried them in the shafts and pits to scratch out the ore for him. Because, of all the people of the world, it would pain them most.

  He had raised a fortress there, as he did everywhere he established a centre of power, and now that was what people thought of when they said, ‘the Dorhambri’; that and the mines. The original town was forever lost to history.

  Dorhambri was set deep in the hills, the new fort at its highest point with a view over the minehead, the old foundry, all the squat ugly buildings the Kinslayer’s people had thrown up, and then across the hilltops, limned at night with the Hathel’s distant blaze. No doubt that counted as scenic if you were the Kinslayer. Celestaine wasn’t sure what they’d find, when they crested those summits to look down at the town.

  Dreams of happy industrious people rebuilding rows of little cottages were swiftly dashed. All the Kinslayer’s work was still in evidence: the long, low, windowless buildings where the miners had been penned—those non-Aethani who were even allowed out of the ground. The slightly bigger blocks with jagged spiked roofs and arrowslits that had housed the guards, she saw, and of course the looming shadow of the fort itself. It was smaller than Bleakmairn, but more work had gone into it. Grennish masons had set hideous gargoyles at intervals, and the walls themselves were intricately incised with complex sigils that made Celestaine’s heart sink to see them. It was not that she knew them, but there was magic set into those shapes and those stones, and it was doing its best to crush any hope in her, just as it had done for all those who laboured in the pits, or even worked there as guards. The Kinslayer was hardly the most caring of employers, after all.

  And he was gone, now. He was dead. She had helped kill him, and seen his body burned. There was absolutely no chance that the Kinslayer was squatting here in Dorhambri behind his dread runes, working his slaves to death because it amused him. And yet she looked on that place and knew that she had lied to Amkulyah when she said it wouldn’t be like he remembered.

  A shift was coming out of the mines, another waiting to get onto the lift. They weren’t chained, but despair hung over them like the smoke over Hathel Vale. There were guards, too, and some were human and some were Yorughan, and a few were Oerni, hardened and brutal in a way the big people so seldom were. The workers were a similar mix, and the only grain of solace Celestaine could take from the sight was that no Aethani were among them. There were men and women of a dozen nations, though, and Grennishmen, still more Yorughan, and some other monstrous things that must have been yet more obscure minions of the enemy; even a couple of Shelliac, their pale shell-skins blackened by soot.

  There were whips. They heard the cracks even at this distance. There were fights amongst the miners that the guards waded in and stopped with kicks and clubs. The foundry belched out a blacker, fouler smoke than even the Vale had given out. Then the foreman came round to look over his domain, and even Nedlam winced at the sight. He was borne on a chair carried by four despondent-looking Yorughan, their bare shoulders and backs a hatch of lash-scars. And he was Aethani, a pot-bellied, stick-limbed creature, his crooked, broken wing-limbs decorated with streamers of bright cloth as though they were a badge of service or a mark of honour. And even this dignitary cast glances up at the keep, where the lord of this place must hold court.

  “How can they?” Celestaine hissed. “Who has done this?”

  “Who would stop them?” Ralas offered dolefully. “It’s not as though the old duke left heirs. As long as the iron’s still coming, who’s going to come over here and tell them to stop?”

  “Us,” Celestaine said, before she could stop herself. She sized up their responses. Nedlam was all for it. Nobody else seemed keen.

  At last, Ralas sighed heavily and said, “I suppose it’s going to be the old sing-for-your-supper line then.”

  “What?”

  “You want to find out who’s in charge, don’t you?” He looked anything but keen about the idea. “I reckon I’m the only one who can just walk in. I’m a starving minstrel, after all, willing to sing his bitter heart out in exchange for a meal. And someone’ll tell me who the chief cheese is, even if I don’t get to sing for him. And what’s the worst that can happen? To me, I mean.”

  “They lock you underground forever,” Amkulyah told him.

  Ralas gave him a sour look. “Yes, thank you for that.”

&nbs
p; He set off on his lunnox and they made a camp between hills, trusting that their fire would go unseen before the Hathel’s radiance. Celestaine was twitchy, chafing at the inaction and wanting to be doing something; though precisely what, she didn’t know. Nedlam was unusually pensive, though. Where she’d have just sat watch or gone instantly to sleep that enviable way she had, now she stared out towards the fortress where it bit into the starry sky.

  “Thoughts?” Celestaine asked her.

  “Bad times,” she grunted. “Never got me in the mines, not for anything I did. Came close, but I knew where the line was. Yorokha yoro na! Yorughan are for fighting. Even when we lived below, it wasn’t us who dug. But those down there…”

  “There were your people on guard too,” Celestaine pointed out.

  Nedlam shrugged, because that hadn’t bothered her. She visibly went back over her words, and frowned. “Maybe they’ve good reason. We don’t know. But those doing the digging—”

  “Ned,” Celestaine said softly. “Are you saying they’re to blame for what they’re made to do?”

  The big Yorughan scowled angrily. “Who’d do it, though? Who’d let themselves be made to do it, or to carry that Shur-meh on his chair?”

  “Welcome to life outside the army,” Celestaine suggested.

  “Stupid,” Nedlam muttered. She was more disturbed by it all than Celestaine had seen her.

  Ralas was back before dawn, practically dragging the lunnox, which had an aversion to the dark.

  “That was an education,” he said, dropping down by the ashes of the fire. “I’ve never done so many laments and dirges back to back. You can’t actually sing anything jolly, it turns out, with those damn runes louring over you.”

  “But what did you find out?” Celestaine demanded. “Did you get into the fort?”

  “I did not,” Ralas confirmed. “Nor did I want to, because I caught the name of the chief here, and you’re going to like it about as much as I did. You remember Jocien Silvermort the Liberator, don’t you?”

  “Piss,” she spat. “He’s not dead?”

  “Riding high and ruling the Dorhambri,” Ralas confirmed.

  “‘Liberator’ sounds like a good thing,” Amkulyah said uncertainly.

  “Yes,” Celestaine agreed. “That’s what a lot of people thought, before they opened their doors to him. And he’s exactly the sort of bastard who’d want the Crown.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “GOING WAY BACK,” Ralas said. “What, after Bladno, Celest? Or was he there for that?”

  Amkulyah and the two Yorughan looked from one to the other as, behind them, the angry radiance of Hathel Vale was slowly consumed by the dawn.

  “Bladno was just you and me,” Celestaine corrected him. “And we weren’t anybody then. You, me, and Wanderer, giving out swords.”

  “A sword,” Ralas pointed out. “Singular. So he obviously saw something in you. But you’re right. It was after Bladno, after you killed that big old dragon. Not exactly a win, and Cherivell and Forinth both fell anyway, but you’d done something. People started to hunt you out, people who’d done something themselves. Years of war left, of course—we’d lose on plenty more battlefields once the Kinslayer got his armies moving again.” He looked at the Yorughan. “I guess you were on some of them yourself. Situation probably seemed a whole lot rosier to you than to us, back then, right?”

  Heno was diplomatic enough just to shrug, but Nedlam said, “Well, yes,” and even grinned a bit before she remembered who she was with and whose side she ended up on. At Heno’s sidelong look, she spread her huge hands. “It was, though.”

  “Those of us that had scored any kind of victories, we found each other. That’s how it started,” Ralas went on. “And those who survived the next five years ended up at Nydarrow, met you two, death of the Kinslayer, all that. I gloss over it because, well, I wasn’t one of the ones who survived, now, was I? But at the start, soon after Bladno, there was Jocien Silvermort. Arvennir, long before Arven got into the war. There were a few—some of the more farsighted warrior orders could see the way things were going. We thought he was principled. Actually he just liked taking over places. He’d picked up a fair grab-bag of sorcery, and had a gang of bully-boys to follow him around. They’d strike where the enemy were weak, drive the Kinslayer’s forces out of a village or a town. The Liberator, they called him. Not for long, in most cases. He took everything he wanted from wherever they went, said it was for the war effort. Then he left, and most times your lot came back twice as hard. But we didn’t know any of that at the time, so he was one of us for quite a while, until…”

  “Szendarc,” Celestaine said. “The Tzarcoman monastery place. We turned up to rescue them and they didn’t want rescuing.”

  Ralas nodded. “We were trying to punch through to meet with the Tzarcomen, because the Kinslayer hadn’t got far past Tzarkona Gate—and that was a costly bloody business, because necromancy’s the Tzarkand way, and they spent more of their own people on making that work than they killed enemy soldiers.”

  Nedlam grunted. “I remember that,” she said sourly. “Got so that being sent to the Dead-Front was punishment detail. I did half a year there.”

  “Anyway, we found this monastery when we were pushing northwest,” Celestaine took up the tale. “The Kinslayer’s forces had gone past it. They couldn’t crack the walls, or just didn’t want to spend the time. We dealt with the camp that’d been left behind to bottle the monks in, but the locals weren’t impressed. So we went on. What we didn’t know was that Jocien took that hard. He didn’t like people who’d already liberated themselves.”

  “What Jocien didn’t know was that we’d meet around half the Kinslayer’s entire army, doubling back because they didn’t fancy being necromanced,” Ralas added. “So we fell back to Szendarc and found that Jocien’s people had got inside it. They were tearing the monks a new one, looting their tombs.”

  “So that was where we parted company with the Liberator,” Celestaine concluded. “There was a fight—us against his people on the wall-top of the monastery with the Kinslayer’s army making double-time towards us. We only just got out. We thought Jocien was dead, but word kept popping up of him, here and there. There were lots of Jocien-the-hero stories, but when you actually followed his trail, he was just screwing people over, same as always. He’d protect you, while he was there, but he’d make you pay for it, just like a city gangster. And now he’s running the Dorhambri.” She shook her head. “How’d he even do it? How did he get all those people?”

  “Little bastards will always follow a bigger bastard,” Ralas suggested. “And from what I heard, those poor sods he’s got working for him? He just sent out to everyone nearby, saying, send over your criminals, send over your prisoners of war, anyone you don’t much care for. And he’s the Liberator, isn’t he? People would trust his reputation. Besides, if he’s making the mines profitable again, who’s going to ask questions?”

  “And he’s got the Crown,” Celestaine says. “Or maybe he just knows where it is. Only we can’t just march in the front, and Silvermort will sure as death recognise me and Ralas. We’re going to have to sneak in, that’s all.”

  “THIS IS RATHER a delightful turn of events, don’t you think?” Doctor Catt asked as he and Fisher strolled into Dorhambri. “Imagine, Joss Silvermort.”

  Fisher grunted, as though he was indeed imagining and the exercise had brought him little joy. With the Staff of Ways broken at the Silver Tower, he had fallen back to an entirely mundane walking aid, but he stabbed it at the ground with each step to make up for the lack of magic.

  “Oh, don’t be so surly,” Catt admonished, in the optimistic manner of a man commanding the tides. “Always good to meet someone in the trade face to face, eh?”

  “Thought you were going to let your tame hero sort it out.”

  “Well, I was.” Catt smiled brightly at the pair of Yorughan who had materialised in his path. “Good morning, fine fellows. Would you be so
kind as to tell your big man that a pair of old friends are paying a visit. Doctors Catt and Fisher from Cinquetann Riverport, dropping in unannounced.”

  Probably the Yorughan didn’t speak human languages well enough to follow most of that, but the sheer volume of words obviously convinced them the matter was beyond their pay grade: one of them loped off to fetch someone more important. The other sort of tagged along beside the two Cheriveni as they walked in, trying to look as though he was doing his job without actually accomplishing anything.

  “It just seems to me,” Catt went on, “that Celestaine has got us as far as she’s going to. Under the circumstances, we’re probably better equipped to secure possession of the Crown than she is.”

  “He’ll just hand it over, will he?” Fisher asked.

  “Trade, Fishy, trade. We’ll have something back at the shop that will tempt him. Something we don’t mind parting with. And if not, well, the Slayer might think she can make her way in by subterfuge, but we’ll already be guests within Joss’s walls, and I think we have a great deal more resources at our disposal than she has, wouldn’t you say?”

  Their progress was interrupted by the four Yorughan and their sedan chair, who barrelled up with a haste not conducive to the dignity of the occupant. “You two, how dare you just march in?” a thin voice demanded. The old Aethani leant down at them, face a picture of owlish outrage. His robe had been fine once, but the back had been torn out to make room for his wing-limbs, and the buttons over his paunch were all in the process of parting company with the velvet they were stitched too.

  “The very best of the morning to you and your kin,” said Catt in what he vaguely remembered to be an Aethani greeting. From the old man’s expression, it probably hadn’t been. “May I present myself as Doctor—of law, of physic, of thaumaturgy—Catt, come here from Cinquetann to pay my fond respects to my old colleague and fellow collector Jocien Silvermort.” He struck a pose with his cane and gave the Aethani his most blistering smile. “And this is Doctor Fisher. Fishy to his friends. Of which category I may be the sole representative.”