‘The year of the great murrain? We didn’t know about that in the mountains. Our goats had no sickness, but we knew something was up with the, the savages – that’s what we called you then. Because the tribes came raiding on our lands when they’d never raided before. Some of our goats were stolen away in the night and the headman’s tent was slashed open. They took his stock of vegetables and meat and he made the rest of us give him ours to make up the loss. My da was furious. He—’
Krish’s expression hardened. ‘He beat me worse than he’d ever beaten me before. Ma tried to stop him and he threw her off. I thought he was going to kill me but I wasn’t afraid. I don’t know why. Maybe I thought it was the end and there was nothing worse to be afraid of. So I wasn’t afraid – I was angry. I hated him. And …’ His throat bobbed as he swallowed. ‘I hated my ma too, because she couldn’t stop him.
‘My da raised his fist and he looked at me and he just stopped. He looked – I didn’t believe it then, but I know now. He looked afraid. He never touched me after that. He only beat my ma.’
Dae Hyo felt sick that his brother had suffered like that and worse that his father had lifted his hand to a woman. What kind of childhood had Krish had? And, a small part of him wondered, what kind of man had it made Krish into?
Krish didn’t seem to feel sorry for himself. His expression was only hopeful as he asked Olufemi, ‘The Brotherband were wearing my rune even then, weren’t they?’
‘They were,’ the mage said.
‘Yes,’ Krish said. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? That was the first time. They felt what I felt through the power of my rune. They felt my anger, and they attacked the Dae.’
‘No,’ Dae Hyo said. ‘It wasn’t your doing. It was them – it was all them.’
‘It was me. I’m sure of it. I’m sorry, Dae Hyo, but I think it was. Maybe the anger worked on something that was inside them already, but it came from me. That’s why they did what no tribesman had ever done before. They were so full of my rage they didn’t care who they hurt. Maybe … maybe it was anger at my ma, I don’t know. She told me I was too angry and I didn’t understand. If I’d known, if I could have made myself feel different …’ For a moment he sounded as anguished as he should, and then he only looked determined. ‘But it proves I’m right, doesn’t it, Olufemi? It proves the runes aren’t dead.’
‘No,’ Dae Hyo said. ‘No.’
But Olufemi’s face glowed with new excitement. ‘It might. It’s possible.’
‘It has to be,’ Krish said. ‘What other hope have we got? We can use my rune – we can use it to help me.’
‘We can’t,’ she said and Krish hung his head until she added, ‘Or we don’t need to. If your theory is correct, the way your power channels through that mark is too unpredictable, too hard to control. But it doesn’t matter. The runes are scribed from the glyphs of being and the glyphs of becoming. The sun and moon lie behind them, their source and their outcome. It’s always been that way, yet I’ve always believed it needn’t be. The runes are the language of life and power. Written appropriately, they can express the idea of Yron without the idea of Mizhara – they can draw on your power alone without hers. It will be … dangerous. Very dangerous and very unpredictable, as all moon-magic workings are, but it can be done. If what you say is true.’
‘It is. You can do it?’ Krish asked.
‘I can try,’ Olufemi said. ‘I will try.’
And Krish smiled. His brother, the man whose rage had killed Dae Hyo’s people, seemed only happy. The sour knot in Dae Hyo’s stomach unwound itself and he rose from the table and fled the room, getting as far as the corridor outside before he fell to his knees and the wine in his stomach came spewing out.
33
It was a steep climb and Cwen paused often, turning her face towards the roaring falls so the fine mist that surrounded them could cool her. Alfreda trudged stolidly beside her, seemingly unaffected by the heat or the exertion. Her followers were strung out on the narrow path behind them, hawks and churls and Jorlith and reluctant thegns and those few of the survivors of Smiler’s Fair who hadn’t melted away into the plains.
The river churned through the gorge its relentless rush had carved into the hard grey stone to spill in hissing white sheets to the plains below. Cwen licked the fine droplets of water from her lips and climbed on until the final rock was crested. The path led onward to a charmless, undulating terrain – scrubby hills and the great mass of people encamped on them.
She’d known what to expect. When they’d abandoned the river at the start of the rapids, Little Cousin had headed into the Silent Sands with Sang Ki and his retinue and Cwen had sent scouts ahead. They’d told her about the Ashane army, but she still gasped to see it. It was like a vast brown stain on the grass. Cwen had always known the Ashane were more numerous than the Moon Forest folk, but she hadn’t realised there was quite such a horde of them. King Nayan must have emptied Ashanesland of its able-bodied men.
‘Fuck,’ Wine said at her shoulder. ‘It was hardly worth us turning up, was it?’
‘But can they fight as well as a hawk?’ Wingard asked.
Cwen wasn’t sure it mattered when there were so many of them. And they weren’t a rabble – or, at least, the rabble had trained soldiers to guide them. The vast force was clustered around banners, probably marking the shipforts where the Ashane thegns lived. Each group seemed to consist of a kernel of metal-armed soldiers inside a husk of lightly armed churls, thousands upon thousands of them.
She could see the perimeter defences they must be digging fresh every day, and the pickets ringing the camp, and the moment when the pickets spotted her. A horseman, made toylike by distance, rode from the outer ditch towards the grander, brightly coloured tents at the heart of the camp.
She felt a murmur of unease in the pit of her stomach. She’d pictured herself being greeted warmly by Nayan, a welcome ally, but the proximity of the meeting fed her doubts.
She brought news of Krishanjit, news that would allow King Nayan finally to find and kill his son. Nayan wanted his son dead, but would doing it gladden him? Sang Ki had told her that the King had adored his wife and been devastated by her loss. Would Krishanjit remind him of his dead love? Or would he find a way to blame his son for her death? She thought of her mother, who must have blamed Cwen for the parting of her own legs, as if as a baby she’d somehow willed herself into existence.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘too late to polish our boots. It’s time to shake hands with the Ashane King.’
The pickets wouldn’t let her hawks pass, looking askance at their spears, so she entered the camp with only Alfreda and Hana beside her. The Seonu woman had chosen to stay with them when her son headed off into the desert with Little Cousin. She seemed to consider herself Cwen’s co-commander, though she led a force of fewer than a hundred Ashane.
The sun was touching the horizon by the time they came to the camp’s centre and the huge structure at its heart, more a fortress made of canvas than anything resembling a tent. Surrounding it were men in leather sewn with metal rings, who carried the stink of rotted meat about them. Carrion riders, Cwen realised when she heard the distant squawk of one of their birds. She felt a stab of pain, not muted by time, when she remembered poor Osgar’s corpse decaying into bones a thousand miles away.
The carrion riders eyed her with the expressions of men who thought she’d trodden in shit and didn’t want her bringing it into their house. The soldier who’d led them through the camp said, ‘She’s here to see King Nayan.’
‘And who’s she?’ one of the riders asked.
‘I’m the woman who’s brought seven thousand to ally with your army,’ Cwen said.
That bought her his attention, though he still looked like a man who’d found a turd floating in his privy. ‘What business is this of the Moon Forest folk?’ he asked.
‘The same business as yours. The moon’s our trade and always has been. But I’m not here to speak to some nasty-smelling lackey
. Take me to your King.’
His hand fell to his sword hilt as Alfreda stepped forward to put herself between the danger and Cwen. Cwen moved her gently aside. ‘If Nayan doesn’t want my fighters, he’ll want my news,’ she said to the carrion rider, her own hands staying clear of her weapons. ‘I know where Krishanjit is.’
The sneer didn’t leave the man’s face, but he led them in. The tent was like an onion, layer after layer of material. There was rough canvas on the outside, dyed in the blue and green checks the Ashane favoured, an antechamber beyond with more soldiers lounging in it, then a blue cotton wall hiding what seemed to be a dining area, and finally green silk that parted to reveal a rug-strewn chamber and important-looking men seated in its centre.
Alfreda hung back, like a hulking shadow at Cwen’s shoulder, and Hana drifted sideways as if she meant to stand by the door and observe, leaving Cwen to stride forward alone with a confidence she didn’t entirely feel.
A dozen faces turned to her. They were probably great shiplords, captains of the carrion flock and advisors to the King, but the only one she recognised was Nayan himself. She’d seen that beaky profile staring at her from gold wheels in her childhood, but that wasn’t what made it so instantly familiar. Sang Ki had shown her his drawing of Krishanjit, and if you’d plucked out most of the lank hair and added a few wrinkles round the eyes and deep grooves cupping the mouth, it would have been this man.
Her eyes moved from him to the map spread on a table between the gathered lords. It showed the far west of the plains, the land around Rah territory.
‘Who are these women?’ one of the lords asked.
Cwen forced herself to incline her head respectfully. These weren’t Moon Forest thegns for her to bully. ‘I’m Cwen, lead hawk of the Hunter and here to bring you my alliance and news of Krishanjit’s whereabouts.’
The King stood, using his hands to lever himself out of his chair as if his back pained him. It remained stooped as he walked to her and she saw a fine tremor in the hand he held out. The result of an apoplectic seizure, she guessed, and clasped it in her own before realising he meant for her to kiss it.
There was a shocked hiss from the gathered lords, but to her surprise Nayan laughed. It was a young sound, far younger than his face. ‘Welcome, Cwen of the Moon Forest hawks, and the five thousand three hundred men you bring with you.’
She must have shown her surprise because his smile widened. ‘We’ve watched your approach for quite some time, hawk. We supposed you came as friends, or you might have done more to hide yourself from us. And we know that the moon is an enemy of your Hunter, and the moon is what my son claims to be. But that you know his location, this we didn’t guess. We’d thought him in Rah lands. Are you here to tell me it isn’t so?’
He gestured at the map. The eight men and two women gathered round it eyed her with hostility as she approached. There was a tall, grey-haired man in leather armour, surely a carrion rider, perhaps their leader. The women were clearly twins and the gangly young man beside them certainly a relative. There was a man Nayan’s own age, his face closed and sour, the lines from his mouth all radiating downward. And there was the one she liked the look of least of all: a handsome man in his middle years with bright white teeth and an expression only an idiot would trust.
She looked down at the map and put her finger in the heart of Rah territory, where the New Misa spilled into the sea. ‘Krishanjit was here. I … met the man who welcomed him and then drove him out. The same man who contacted you.’
‘Rah Uin,’ Nayan said.
She nodded. ‘The Rah tribe went to war with itself over your son. He was forced to flee.’ She moved her finger, tracing it south along the coast until it landed in Mirror Town.
Nayan frowned at the map and she could guess what he was thinking. A hundred miles of the plains and another two hundred of the Silent Sands lay between him and his quarry. ‘You’re sure?’ he asked.
‘She isn’t,’ Hana said and Cwen snapped her head round to glare at her. She’d forgotten the Seonu woman was there.
Nayan eyed Hana thoughtfully. ‘And who are you, my lady?’
‘Seonu Hana, my liege, leader of that tribe among your forces.’ Her bow was deeper than Cwen’s.
Cwen arched an eyebrow at her. It was the first she’d known there were Seonu among the Ashane, but she seemed to remember that the Ashane had conquered the tribe, so perhaps it made sense. Still, Hana as their leader? Sang Ki would shit a hedgehog if he heard.
‘Cwen heard of your son’s location because of a man she tortured,’ Hana said. ‘From his daughter, who said it to stop the torture. Information obtained that way is worth little.’
Nayan scowled at Cwen, all his earlier friendliness gone. ‘Torture? This is not the way given to us by the Five or the prow gods of our hearths.’
Cwen felt the same sick shame clench her gut that the thought of this always caused, but she made herself face Nayan without shrinking. ‘I did what was needed as my mistress commanded me. And the information was good.’
‘It’s worthless,’ said the sour-faced old man.
‘It’s a bent twig on a trail we’re following,’ Cwen insisted. ‘Hana’s son is travelling the Silent Sands right now to scout out Mirror Town and see if Krishanjit is there. He has messenger owls with him – we’ll know soon after he does.’
‘Mirror Town,’ the carrion rider said. He had the rough voice of a man who shouted more than he spoke. ‘The mages won’t take kindly to our army coming there.’
‘Krishanjit had a mage with him,’ Hana confirmed. ‘She’s taken him back to her people.’
‘And we all know what weapon the mages can wield,’ the sour-looking lord agreed.
It occurred to Cwen that not all the Ashane were happy to be part of this army; that perhaps most of them thought the battle futile. She looked around the table at the grave faces and wondered if they’d be glad of an opportunity to back down from the fight. But without them and their thousands of soldiers, what chance did she have against the mages?
Alfreda sidled up to her in that awkward way of hers, as if she thought a six-foot-tall woman built like an ice oak might not be noticed. She leaned down and whispered, ‘The fire javelin’ in Cwen’s ear.
‘We have a weapon powerful enough to defeat the mages,’ Cwen told the Ashane King.
‘A weapon with no ammunition,’ Hana pointed out. ‘A black powder weapon and only the Maeng know how to make the black powder. It’s a secret any Maeng woman would take to her grave.’
But Nayan wasn’t looking at her; his attention was once again focused on Cwen. ‘What is this weapon and what can it do?’
The Moon Forest folk and the Ashane weren’t enemies, but they’d never been allies either. Was it wise to tell another nation about the fire javelin? But there were no nations, no boundaries that mattered except the one between sun and moon.
‘It’s a metal tube, and balls of metal come out of it,’ Cwen explained. ‘Very fast and very hard. The black powder pushes them out. Listen, this is all you need to know: it’s a weapon that helped us to defeat Krishanjit’s Brotherband when the warriors outnumbered us ten to one.’
‘But it’s useless without the black powder,’ Hana said again.
Nayan smiled. ‘It’s just as well then that my spies have already learned the secret of making it.’
The terrain in the eastern tribelands was hilly, very different from the endless flatness of the plains through which the New Misa had brought them. Their horses paused to crop the browning grass at the top of one rise and Alfreda stroked Edred’s head as he chewed.
Cwen had brought her clutch with her and Alfreda wished she hadn’t, though she knew they were needed for the work ahead. But they spoke so loudly and so freely as they waited for their mounts to eat, spending words like clay anchors. She felt her own silence within that noise, a visible absence.
Cwen clucked at her horse to urge it over beside Alfreda’s. ‘Think Nayan can be right?’ she
whispered so the rest wouldn’t hear or try to join the conversation. It was strange to get such kindness from her. Alfreda had seen Cwen fight. She wasn’t a kind woman, but she was always gentle with Alfreda.
‘I think he could be,’ Alfreda said. ‘I heard the rumour myself.’
‘Bat shit?’
‘Aye. Horseshit makes plants grow, doesn’t it? It isn’t so very strange that it has other uses.’
‘And there was me thinking Nayan just wanted us out of the way. He’s a strange one, isn’t he? Hard to think he’s a man who plans to kill his own son.’
There was something in Cwen’s expression that said these words weren’t as light as they seemed, a hidden weight to them like the metal core in an ice-oak joist. Alfreda would have asked more, but the other hawks came to surround them, the big shouting mass of them, and she hung her head and let their noise pass over her.
‘We’ve found it!’ a fresh-faced boy announced. ‘Aebbe has sharp eyes – it’s to the south by that little lake, where the trees part. You can see the black mouth of it.’
It took them only an hour’s further ride to reach the cave. It had seemed small from a distance, the lake too, but up close Alfreda saw the cave’s entrance gape many times her own head-height and the dark blue of the lake’s water spoke of a great depth.
‘It’s very dark in there,’ Wingard said. The twins made Alfreda most nervous of all, with their easy closeness to Cwen and loud, confident voices.
‘It’s facing east,’ Cwen said. ‘No need to piss yourself – the sun must shine straight in every morning. It will cleanse it against the worm men.’
‘I can hear the bats.’ Wine looked no more happy than his brother.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Cwen scoffed. ‘Bats squeak as high as a thegn when he farts. You can’t hear them.’
But Alfreda knew what Wine meant. There was a prickling of her skin and a discomfort in her ears; a noise more sensed than heard. At noon the bats should all be asleep, but as they drew nearer she thought she could hear the rustling of their wings in the darkness, thousands of leathery susurrations.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 36