by Ian Irvine
Another Merdrun attacked. Tallia fought him absently, killed him and was moving on when the gate spat out two halves of a man—one of Captain Gunce’s group—belched a spray of blood and vanished.
It had been open for eight or nine minutes but the passage had been much slower than expected; no more than sixteen hundred of the twenty-eight hundred had passed through, and Malien would not reopen the gate to send them. They had agreed that in advance, otherwise she and her Aachim would be too exhausted to recreate the gate for the retreat.
But sixteen hundred was not enough.
57
IT VANISHED
As Sulien tumbled head over heels through the gate, the inside of her skull still felt as if it had been burned. If Karan had taken a few seconds longer to block the link, Sulien knew she would be dead.
And Llian was in terrible danger. He was the cleverest and most wonderful teller in the world, but he was useless at most other things. He was always falling out of the fruit trees in the orchard and once he had nearly amputated his toes digging out carrots. She had to save him.
But when the gate tossed her out onto the bloody, corpse-strewn ground of the Merdrun’s fortress, she saw that she had made a terrible mistake. How could she even find Llian in this chaos? She scuttled under the blackened wreckage of a sky ship cabin and hid. It looked as though it had been blown in two, then partly burned, though the pilot’s seat and levers were intact and thankfully there were no bodies inside.
Twenty yards away, a Merdrun warrior hacked down a skinny nervous officer, poor Captain Clabb, and looked around for someone else to attack. Sulien squeezed under the tilted cabin where the firelight did not reach. The wreckage was still hot, and smoke stung her eyes and nose, but it was better than smelling the blood.
She closed her eyes but could not stop reliving Clabb’s death or imagining Llian being killed the same way. How could she have imagined she could help him? She had made things much worse—delivered herself to an enemy who wanted her dead.
Sulien was checking that all was clear between her hideout and Malien’s gate so she could scuttle back to it when, with an unpleasant belch, it sprayed blood everywhere and vanished.
Now she had no way of escape. She poked her head out, looking for familiar faces, but did not see any. What was she to do? If she left her hiding place she was bound to be caught. Could the triplets detect her presence? They had sensed Karan every time she had spied on them so they would probably realise Sulien was here before long. She looked out from under the other side of the cabin and saw thousands of enemy reserves waiting in formation on the north-eastern and eastern hills. The Merdrun were so confident of victory that they had not bothered to send them down.
It was hopeless. The allies would all be killed, and the Merdrun would take Santhenar and ruin it just like they had ruined Gwine.
“Daddy, Daddy,” she whispered, “where are you?”
No answer. Only one chance remained—the triplets. Their spells, based on power gained from drinking the lives of innocent people, made the Merdrun stronger and Gergrig much stronger. And Sulien knew the triplets better than anyone. She had to locate them and find a way to break their power—quickly. If she succeeded it would give the army, and Karan and Llian, a chance. If she failed, it would be hideous.
She dared not use her far-sensing gift. The triplets would recognise her immediately and hunt her down. She would use the new, untaught gift that allowed her to sense feelings and emotions from afar.
It did not take long; the triplets’ emotions were so strong and strange and sick that they shone like mud-brown beacons. Sulien peered out, plotted the safest path to them and, so afraid that she was fighting not to throw up, began to crawl across the corpse-strewn battlefield.
58
THEY LOVE DRINKING LIVES
Where was the gate? It should have opened ten minutes ago. Had Malien failed? Without the rest of the troops the battle would be over in minutes. Without the gate and Hissper’s assassins, there was no point being here.
In spirit form again, Karan made her way across the series of little battlefields within the walls encircling the great Merdrun camp, searching for Gergrig. She did not see him, nor anyone else she recognised, but there were many bodies, and few of them were the enemy. The troops from the sky ships had taken terrible casualties and the odds were high that Llian was one of them.
She dared not pursue that thought; it would only undermine her when she needed all her wits about her. The huge walled camp was now a maze of smoking pieces of sky ship, dead soldiers, broken weapons, burning buildings and blasted cisterns whose tops had fallen in, turning them into pits of unknown depth that it would be easy to fall into in the smoky dark and impossible to get out of.
And the night was thick with illusions that Karan, who had much experience of the incomparable arts of the Faellem, recognised at once. Without their illusions, carefully tailored to confuse the Merdrun but not the allies, every one of their troops would now be dead.
Boom!
Several hundred yards away, near the smoking rags of the soldiers’ tents, the air was hissing into a luminous oval halo—the gate. A pair of horsemen burst out, their mounts bucking and whinnying in their terror. Gates were bad enough for people, who at least knew what to expect. How much more terrifying would the passage be for an animal?
The cavalry poured forth, a company of about a hundred. Janck’s dumb idea, she presumed. On an open battlefield in daytime armoured horsemen might have decimated the Merdrun, who surely had not fought cavalry before, but in this dark, crowded camp there were too many obstacles to fall over or into, too many places where a horse might break a leg or its rider his neck. It was unlikely any of them would survive the next hour. Karan turned away, disgusted. She cared more for horses than for most of the people she knew.
She searched for signs of the Faellem but did not see them; they were too well hidden. Their arts, honed over more than fifty thousand years, were uncanny.
Nor was there any sign of the triplets. The previous magiz had been easy to find; she had always been close to the greatest mayhem, drinking the lives of the dying. But perhaps, with the summon stone now so mighty, they could obtain the power they needed elsewhere.
No! Karan remembered their greedy lust as they had drained the first group of acolytes. They love drinking lives; they crave having power over the powerless.
“Karan?” said a low voice behind her. Tallia.
“Yes?” She was behind Karan, looking all around. Tallia’s art was sufficient to tell that Karan was nearby, though not enough to see her in the disembodied state.
“Embody yourself? We need to talk.”
Why? Pain speared through Karan. Was Llian dead?
She triggered the spell that dematerialised her body from the tree fork several miles away and, with even more pain than usual, materialised it here. Instantly the churning in her belly was back; she was sure she had eaten a bad oyster. She threw up violently.
Tallia, who was almost a head taller than Karan, effortlessly scooped her up. “Can’t talk in the open.” She carried her past a line of shredded tents to the smoking ruins of a storeroom.
“What is it?” Karan’s teeth were chattering, for Tallia had the sick look of someone bearing awful news. “Is … it Llian?”
“I don’t know anything about him.”
Relief flooded Karan. “Did he even get here?”
“Yes, he was on Yggur’s sky ship.”
“He’s hopeless at fighting,” Karan said frantically. “Why did Janck send him anyway?”
“I have no idea, but Janck’s dead. Karan, it’s Sulien,” said Tallia, then stopped.
Karan clutched at her heart. “The triplets got to her, didn’t they? I was too slow to block the link; I heard her scream.” She grabbed Tallia’s hands. “Is she …?” She could not say it. Just thinking it was unbearable.
“Sulien was all right, last I saw.” Tallia looked even sicker. “Karan, she came throu
gh the gate.”
“What?” Karan shrieked.
Tallia shoved a hand across her mouth. “Shh!” She checked outside, then came back and said in a rush, “No one had the faintest idea what she was planning. She just ran into the gate. Janck and I went after her but there was no sign of her.”
Karan had no strength left. She slumped to the ashy floor of the storeroom. “Why would she come to the most dangerous place in the world,” she said dazedly, “after all we’ve done to protect her?”
“She spied on Uigg and heard Gergrig was expecting an attack,” said Tallia. “And then she discovered Llian was here, and walking into a trap …”
“The triplets must have lured her here,” said Karan, getting up. “We’ve got to find her before they do.”
“How?” said Tallia. “Anyone out in the open will be killed in seconds.”
“We’ve got to find her,” Karan said implacably.
“What if she’s safer where she is?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“She’s a clever, sensible girl.”
“Really sensible,” Karan snarled, “coming to the enemy’s camp.”
“You once told me Sulien is good at hiding and not being seen. If you go looking for her you’ll attract attention to her, and if you’re caught—”
“So now I’m a danger to my own daughter, am I?” Karan snapped.
“Yes, you are. I think—”
Tallia broke off as a squad of black-clad men and women went by so stealthily that they appeared to be gliding. Karan shuddered.
“Is that …?” she whispered.
“Hissper and his assassination squad, hunting the magiz.”
The assassins crept from one patch of darkness to another, making their way up the slope in the direction of a small cliff-bound hill due north. But as they crossed a rivulet the ground erupted, then dozens of Merdrun encircled the assassins. They fought desperately but the Merdrun’s numbers were too great, and one by one the assassins were cut down until all were dead.
“That’s it,” said Tallia in a deathly voice. “The mission has failed. It’s all been for nothing.”
59
SO WE’RE TRAPPED
“There’s nothing more we can do here,” Tallia said grimly. “I’d better signal a retreat and call the sky ships down.”
“The Merdrun will shoot them out of the air,” said Karan.
“Then it’ll have to be the gate, assuming Malien’s people have the strength to reopen it.”
“The enemy will be expecting that too.”
“We’ve no choice. Call Malien—”
“I can’t link! I can only contact her through Sulien.”
“Are you saying,” said Tallia with an uncharacteristic shiver, “that there’s no way to contact Malien?”
“Yes.”
“Why can’t one of the Aachim do it?”
“Mind linking is a very rare gift.”
Tallia swallowed. “Then call Sulien.”
“The moment I unblocked her link last time, the triplets attacked her. If I do it again, they’ll find her long before Malien can reopen the gate, and Gergrig will know where it’s going to open. He’d take the gate and send his army through to attack Zile.”
“Then we’re trapped and we’re all going to die,” said Tallia. “Unless …”
“What?”
“Unless you can find the triplets and kill them.”
60
THEY’RE KILLING MUMMY!
Llian caught up with the freed Gwinians as they followed Wilm up to the Merdrun camp, though he did not plan to fight with them. Karan was somewhere in this chaos and he had to find her.
After the Gwinians attacked, he slipped up the splintery wooden stairs to the top of the watchtower. A short distance to the north, in the smaller western half of the camp, there had been a number of rude wooden buildings—storehouses, cookhouses, eating halls and all the other structures required in a semi-permanent camp—though these had been targeted in the early attacks and most had been burned.
On the left side of the stream, further up the slope, stood a cluster of large tents, mostly blue and one red, which probably belonged to Gergrig and his officers. Further on a group of yellow tents would be for the triplets and their acolytes.
North-east of the gates the ground was bare for half a mile. More than a thousand orange tents had stood there for the common soldiers, though they had also been burned. North of them was the paved parade ground where the sky ships had landed. Half a mile further on the ground rose to a gentle mound where a battle was raging.
Karan would not go near Gergrig—he was too dangerous—but she might go after the triplets to eliminate the threat to Sulien and to prevent the Crimson Gate being opened. Where would they be?
He climbed down and headed up towards the burned buildings. The smoke was thick there and reeked of charred meat and grain. There were bodies outside several of the buildings and more inside. Llian did not go in—the past hour had given him memories for a whole year of nightmares—but he had to be armed.
The Gwinians had taken all the fallen weapons, though beneath a corpse he found a badly notched sword with the tip broken off—better than nothing. He buckled it on and headed up to the officers’ tents, which were unguarded. Each held no more than spare clothes, eating and drinking utensils and other sundry items. The largest blue tent, which he assumed to be Gergrig’s, contained a number of locked metal chests, but at the entrance Llian felt an overwhelming premonition of danger and went no further. Mancers knew how to protect their treasures.
The yellow tents must have belonged to the young female acolytes, judging by the clothing. There were also several small books written in Merdrun glyphs and a large chart on grey leather containing rows of symbols in various colours. They meant nothing to him either.
The last tent stood by itself and was red with a green rope down the ridgeline. The triplets’ tent, he assumed; Karan had seen the old magiz working in such a tent on one of her visits to Cinnabar. This one was larger than all the others except Gergrig’s—it had to accommodate three large women. He was hesitating outside when Sulien’s terrified voice rang through his mind.
Daddy, help! They’re killing Mummy!
His heart gave the desperate lurch of a fish trying to free itself from a hook. “Who?” he gasped. “Who’s got her?”
No answer, of course. Sendings could sometimes reach him, if the sender was gifted enough, but he had no way of answering.
They’re killing Mummy! That could mean the triplets, but it could also mean Gergrig and his soldiers.
“Where is she, Sulien?” he said uselessly.
He stepped out from between the tents and scanned the camp. The fire near the top of the northern hill burned as white and bright as before. The battle against the north-western wall continued, now lit by bonfires lit on top of the wall. Despite the intervention of close to two thousand Gwinians the Merdrun still had the upper hand and were slowly squeezing the trapped soldiers into a tighter space.
The battle around the north-eastern mound had broken up into a series of smaller conflicts, but these were too far away for Llian to tell who was winning. The Merdrun, he thought gloomily. They always won and, though Wilm had led the rest of the Gwinians that way, what could they do?
The triplets could be anywhere, and so could Gergrig, though Llian imagined he would be in the thick of the fighting. It was more probable that the triplets had Karan, but where?
Their tent was a mess of clothes and robes, half-eaten meals, discarded underwear and boots, and various items that might have been pieces of strange jewellery or for ritual use. He hurled the clothes about, searching for anything that might give him a clue to their whereabouts.
After several minutes’ searching he found, beneath a pile of underwear, several scraps of paper. One contained a crudely drawn torus, apparently carved from stone, which had been coloured red with a fingertip dipped in blood. It must hav
e been done some time ago for the blood was flaking and had gone a red-brown colour. It had to signify the blood torus, a chilling symbol but no use in finding Karan, and time was running out. They’re killing Mummy!
He looked down at the second scrap of paper. It depicted what he first thought to be an eye with something inside it, though he subsequently realised that it was more likely to represent a cave containing a tall vase—or a high, narrow altar—with rays or tongues of fire rising from the top.
It did not help at all.
61
IT BARELY HURT AT ALL
Karan had scoured the camp for Sulien and the triplets but had found neither, though Sulien was exceptionally good at hiding.
But Karan could not stop sensing the triplets. They were capering around a fire, gleefully drinking lives and sending surges of power to Gergrig to maintain his invincibility in battle.
To do their foul business they had to be close to the dying, though she did not think they would be on the defensive walls among the patrolling guards. Unlikely they would be on the battlefield either—Gergrig would not risk them in such chaos. They must be on one of the three hills, and the northern one was highest and had the best view of the camp.
She closed her eyes and rotated slowly, trying to sense them out. Their presence was in her mind whichever way she faced, though it was overwhelmingly strong when she was looking north. They had to be somewhere on that hill.
No time to waste. She found a hiding place for her physical body between a cluster of boulders in the centre of the camp, near where two rivulets became one and the ground was boggy. It wasn’t very safe but it was the best she could do, and she used the disembodiment spell at once. Instantly she detected an eager alertness, a salivating greed and a sick hunger. The triplets knew she was in the camp.