CLOSER.
With a scream that echoed the need of every heart that still beat in the chests of the Foresters, Alann threw his axe with all his might, before lunging face down on the ground, the razor scythe of black iron that jutted from a spoked wheel just skimming the top of his hair. A heavy thud behind him, the sound of the chariot receding as it overshot him.
Rising, slowly, trembling, Alann turned, almost in disbelief, the forces fighting about the forest halting, for a moment, in their conflict, turning as one and gazing, open mouthed at the scene before them.
There, in the dead leaves atop the hard, frozen earth, the great, hulking figure of Kurnos lay, still and silent on its back, the shining head of the woodsman’s axe buried deep in his chest, the handle sticking up into the air, as if signalling his passing to one and all.
Slowly, Alann made his way to the corpse, gazing down with numbed finality at the prone form. Nearly a century, a reign of blood, a scourge across the land tearing brother from brother, mother from daughter, ended at the humble stroke of a woodsman’s blade. He stood over the body, looking down on the face that had caused so much pain to so many.
Roget. Felice. Avenged.
“Justice,” he whispered, his breath a quiet sigh. For no matter what happened from here on out, his quest was fulfilled. His family avenged.
Amused eyes flicked open.
“Not yet!”
A meaty hand reached up in a flash to grasp Alann about the arm, throwing him like a toy to roll across the clearing. He shook his head, looking up with tears of disbelief as the Huntsman rose to his feet, pulling the axe from his bloodied chest as though ‘twere no more than a splinter, an irritation, before dropping it to the floor with a clang.
That bearded face smiled, a hideous mockery of good humour, as he regarded the staggered hopelessness of the peasant before him.
“I am Kurnos, Lord of the Hunt. You think an axe can fell me?”
He laughed, loud, heartily, the faces of every Forester who heard it running cold.
“This is no fairy-story, woodsman.” He advanced, slowly, implacably. “There are no happy endings here…”
***
Invictus stood on the bridge twixt his wing of the Pen and the Seers’ Tower. The sky above the sea was clear, for once, the Isle of Storms silhouetted stark and jagged in the moonlight, the Beacon, over halfway complete, already rising high, like a thrust sword, piercing the heavens.
“How long now?”
The raven-headed Seeress, dwarfed by his mighty form, stood by his side, leaning against the railing of stone.
“Three months. We are ahead of schedule.”
A grunt and a nod. She looked up at him with her blue eyes, searching.
“Something troubles you, my King?”
He shook his head, but spoke anyway, taking the chance to voice his concerns to the Seeress whilst she was here.
“Dreams, again, my dear. Always the dreams.” He turned to her. “They get stronger, these memories, ever since that night. And they are random; it feels as though they are trying to recall a time long past, but can’t, bouncing off a barrier and settling instead on different times in my reign. I dreamt of meeting you, of finding Bavard, Kurnos, founding the Khrdas and Memphias.” He shook his head, puzzled. “I have to admit, it confuses me. I feel almost… lost at times. Uncertain of my direction.” He pointed over to the Isle. “The Beacon, for instance; why do we build it? What need a God-King to edify himself?”
The Seeress took his hand in hers, so slim and cool, drawing close to him.
“This confusion will pass, my King. Whatever sorcery the traitors employed obviously still lingers. But it shall pass, nonetheless, have no fear.”
“I feel no fear, Cece. You know that.”
She nodded, smiling.
“But you still don’t answer me; what need a God-King for such edification?”
She didn’t answer, turning instead out to sea, pointing up with a slender arm to a cluster of stars that were bunched together in the heavens above the Isle.
“You see those stars, my King?”
He nodded, for see them he did, with eyes keener than hers. She smiled as she continued.
“They grow closer, day by day. And as luck would have it, the day of completion is when they shall align, for the first time in a little over a century. It is by their light that the Emerald Beacon shall begin to shine, casting out its green glow, the glow of your gaze, across the lands far and wide.”
He looked at her, still trying to decipher her point as she went on.
“You see, my King, it is not about edifying you for yourself. It’s about proclaiming your deeds far and wide, for all to see. When that Beacon begins to glow on that fateful day, everyone shall know of the deeds of Invictus. In this world and far, far beyond.”
The King laughed.
“Far beyond this world, eh? You exaggerate. But your point makes sense, I suppose.”
She smiled, her eyes twinkling with a curious amusement.
“Of course, I exaggerate, but you can forgive me a little overexcitement. My whole life is devoted to you, to furthering your reign. But I can see you’re still troubled. It will take more than just pretty words to soothe them.” She walked backwards towards his chamber door, his hand in hers, drawing him on, her thin silken robe translucent in the silvery moonlight revealing a form slender and taut with which the King had become intimately familiar over the years. “Come, let me see what I can do to ease your burden, my King.”
***
The hour was late as the Seeress left the chambers of her King. He had not slept after their lovemaking, for he had neither the need nor the inclination of late, instead, off roaming the Pen as he so often would of a night.
Barefoot, she padded across the cold, stone flying bridge, the wind that wound about the towers howling a low and sorrowful dirge as if aware of the her business. She entered the Seers’ Quarter, making her way down the corridor lined with the rooms of her slumbering girls, before finding herself in the Scrying chamber, the crystal device in the centre of the room humming with arcane power.
Kneeling, she raised her hands to the sides of the crystal, summoning forth her power with a thought, runes along its brass cradle flaring up and within the cloudy depths of the crystal sphere a vision swam into focus.
“Ah, Seeress! To what do I owe this nocturnal pleasure? And how much do I have to pay?”
The Huntsman was drunk, unsurprisingly, and Ceceline didn’t rise to his banter.
“I am in no mood for games, Kurnos. I only enquire as to how goes our campaign in the North.”
The Master of the Hunt belched and grinned into whatever reflective surface was showing Ceceline’s face at that precise moment.
“Swimmingly, my dear! Right at this precise moment we head South, with fresh captives for the Games! Oh, but the entertainments that await!” He chuckled in anticipation, even as Ceceline stared cold blue daggers into his vision.
“South? I’m hoping for your sake that you mean to say you’ve found and scoured that valley of Shamans and you’re bringing captives from their ranks, yes? For last I heard you were struggling to make headway in the Hills…”
The intoxicated Huntsman swayed slightly, unable to think up a defence.
“Damn you, Kurnos. You and your childish games will have us all on the end of an obsidian blade! Even now his dreams are wracked with memories that fill his waking hours with doubt. I’m having my work cut out here to keep everything on track. If those Shamans that you’ve so carelessly forgotten about should make another attempt on him, it could spell the end of us all.”
The Master of the Hunt snorted in derision.
“Nigh a hundred years we have dangled him from the strings of fate without his knowledge and he’s never suspected a thing yet…”
“And you would have it all fall apart right at the climax because of your hunger for sport?”
They were both silenced by a sudden and unmistakable scent, the air in b
oth the Scrying Chamber and wherever Kurnos had pitched his tent growing thick and heavy with the tang of sulphur and unnatural burning. A whispering rose up, low, insistent, scratching, the sound of a thousand tormented souls clamouring from behind the fabric of reality.
Silence, our loyal servants. Cease your bickering.
The two closed their mouths, skin prickling with the presence of those voices from another reality, ancient, evil. Hungry. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere and, no matter how many decades they had remained in their service, the sensation of pure malice carried in the words never failed to cause the heart to beat a little faster, the skin to sweat a little more profusely.
The strands of fate weave according to plan. Our pawn is oblivious and the petty conjurers of the North make no move to help. Soon the alignment will begin and Invictus will be broken.
A voice, human, real, yet not lacking in a cold malice of its own, came out of the dark behind Ceceline, causing her to start.
“I will be there when he is,” whispered Memphias, grey eyes peering into the future. “For my daggers hunger for the taste of a God-King’s blood…”
Soon our faithful assassin, soon. Remain vigilant, all of you; for it is not the larger things that stand to confound our plans, but the small things, the inconspicuous things.
The pebbles that go unnoticed, only to start a landslide.
***
Far below the stone tower of the Seers’ Quarter, where dark conspiracy brewed in the dead of night, waves crashed, hard and insistent, into the resolute and jagged rocks of the coast below the docks of the City, hungering to claim the land, yet ever denied by the steadfast stone.
The pale light of the moons highlighted a form that lay bedraggled on the black rocks. It was still and one could be forgiven for thinking it dead, but a shuddering, wracking cough that spewed sea-water from cracked lips showed that it was still, barely, clinging to life.
Raising his head on trembling neck muscles, Jafari looked up into the dark cliffs, spying the docks, the access tunnels carved into the very rock that ran in a meandering labyrinth under the Pen and into the kitchen stores deep beneath the keep.
In a pained grimace, the nomad pushed himself upright onto crab-bitten feet, smiling at his good fortune.
“Made it…”
Chapter Seven:
Higher and higher he strode, his pace never slowing, his limbs never tiring, making his way patiently up the thousand steps to the platform at the top of the soaring tower. Even through the afternoon cloud, he could see the stars, their brightness increasing the closer they came to alignment.
One more week and the Beacon would be lit.
He continued his ascent, passing Clansmen at intervals who saluted him, feeling the might of his presence before he even reached them. Every now and then he would glance sidelong at the artifice of the brickwork. He had witnessed many atrocities during the last century; committed a fair few of them himself. But mortar of flesh? Part of him reeled at the sheer barbarism of the act. But another, larger part of him found it amusing; he was the Barbarian King, however ancient and outdated the title now, and barbarism was apt. Besides, Ceceline knew more of the power that fuelled them, knew how to placate it, to guide it than he did. He was a mere vessel, a channel, an avatar of that power, content to use it, rather than experiment with it.
The hows and wherefores didn’t concern him.
At long last, after half an hour of climbing the spiral staircase that encircled the tower of grisly stone, he reached the summit, stopping as he stepped onto the platform proper and turning to gaze across the dark sea to Pen-Merethia, the sprawling city-fortress clutched to the coast like a monstrous limpet.
How long ago now had he taken over that keep from Raga, finding Ceceline within and changing the history of the world forever? Over the years, the decades that had followed, he had rebuilt, remodelled the city to his own liking, expanding, fortifying. He could make out from here the Arena, where tonight the Games would be held for his amusement and that of the gathered Nobles and returned Huntsmen. Down there, at the foot of the cliffs, the docks he’d had carved, so that the ships of the Merchant Coast could bring goods directly into the stores beneath the keep. The twin towers, tall and imposing; Ceceline’s where toiled the Coven of Seers, scrying at this very moment for the shamans of the North. His wherein slumbered Dexter and Sinister, his loyal glaives, undrawn for years now, yet never dulled, never losing either edge or shine.
Yes, he’d left his mark on this city over the years.
So why then, when he gazed upon it, did it no longer feel like home?
A gust of cold wind blew across the tower and, despite not feeling the cold, he instinctively drew his bear-skin cloak about him, the horns atop each shoulder waggling like the antenna of a hugely oversized bumblebee. It was funny; he used to be able to recall with great relish the fight with the Horned Bear that had attacked him on his journey from the distant North. Every blow, every scratch, as he’d cast his glaives aside and snapped the creature’s neck with his bare hands as though he’d had an old score to settle with that particular species.
Yet now, when he tried to think back to that time, to the reasons he’d even been in the North, all he could see was a haze of anger and hatred that blurred all the details. He’d come from the North with revenge on his mind, but the reasons were gone, only the bloodlust had remained.
“Shekel for your thoughts, my King?”
Bavard stood next to him, gazing out on the same scene, the breeze ruffling the long hair that streamed in front of his handsome face. Invictus smiled at his General.
“Do you ever feel like you’re going mad?”
Bavard laughed.
“Been there, done that.”
The King nodded, recalling the bloodthirsty slave of long ago, as Bavard continued.
“In answer to your question, though, I believe every man has madness within. Only purpose can quell it. It’s when a man has no purpose, no reason and,” he emphasized, “no freedom, that’s when the madness comes to the fore. Think of the tiger, prowling its cage, yearning for the hunt.”
The King pondered this.
“And your madness is quelled, these days?”
A nod.
“Aye, my Lord. I have a purpose now; to serve you, a duty I will do gladly for the rest of my days, never-ending though they may be.”
“Doesn’t that mean you have no freedom?”
“No, my King.” A smile on his face. “For if you remember, this life was offered me, not forced. You could have killed me in our little duel. Besides, as your General I get the chance to fight from time to time, unleash the madness within, keep it from building. Though it no longer rules me. Of that, I’m truly glad.”
Invictus regarded the man in front of him, immortal, as with the other council members, Cece, Memphias, Kurnos. Yet the thought struck him that, despite his horrific beginnings, a slave forced into slaughter and carnage, perhaps he remained the most human of them all.
The duo turned, as one, to stride from the edge of the platform, heading towards its centre where a tall, pyramid-like altar rose a further hundred feet into the sky. As they reached the steps at its base, Invictus frowned as they passed an intricately wrought emerald, breath-taking in its purity, the height of a man. Shouldn’t that be in place already? The lighting was only a week away.
His answer came as they reached the summit of the altar.
Ceceline awaited them, a smile on her face, like that of a proud parent showing off her newborn to the world for the first time. At the very top of the altar, in the centre, stood a block, unshaped, rough, black and translucent.
“What do you think so far, my King? An impressive achievement, yes?”
Invictus nodded as he embraced her.
“An incredible undertaking, my dear. How you’ve managed it in so few months, I have no idea.”
“Manpower,” she laughed. “A great deal of manpower. Some of it even voluntary.” She saw t
he questioning look in his eyes that kept darting down to the emerald, then up to the unfinished block that was, he assumed, to form its dragon-claw cradle. “Of course, it remains to be completed,” she admitted. “That is where you come in, my King.”
He frowned, puzzled, but enlightenment soon struck as he gazed at the oddly familiar texture of the stone block, its translucent lustre putting him in mind of something, something he himself had had a hand in making, many years ago.
“My glaives,” he finally spoke out loud. “This obsidian stone, it’s the same as my glaives.”
The Seeress laughed gently as she saw his stunned expression, his fingers roaming the indestructible surface with the tentative familiarity of a lover not seen for many years.
“You see now why we need your input, my King. No tool of man could hope to carve the design from this stone, for it is every bit as untouchable as your swords. Chisels and hammers shatter like glass. Only raw power can hope to shape it, such that is beyond my means to wield.” She came close to him. “But you, my King, are just the man for the job.”
***
The Games. A by now time-honoured tradition, brought forth by Invictus himself to make use of those captured by the Hunt who proved too tough, too resolute, too unwilling to be broken and sold as slaves. Some captives were simply too determined or too frenzied to serve their new masters and in times past, back in the days of the Barbarian Kings of old, they would have been let loose anew to run across the Steppes, hunted down for sport by the Clansmen, to keep their instincts sharp and their blades bloody.
But the God-King, despite his lofty station, was a man who knew to work the people, to keep them onside by appearing generous, despite little cost to himself. He had found other uses for such Slaves.
He had extracted from them entertainment for the masses.
The Games. The arena soaring high into the night sky of Merethia, rendered bloody orange by the flickering glow of the twelve open fire-bowls that encircled the arena floor. The crowd of thousands, roaring in mounting excitement from the stands, competing in volume with the fanfare of trumpets, the cries of the traders who wandered back and forth hawking their wares of cured meats and honeyed dates.
The Fall to Power (The Graeme Stone Saga) Page 12