by Lara Morgan
‘Go to the serpents, then get some rest,’ Rorc said.
‘All right. I’ll be at the lookout,’ Tallis said, leaving the tent.
All eleven serpents were gathered in the ravine on the far side of the scarp, staring toward the mountains. Their minds were filled with fear and anger and a consuming need to fight. Tallis stood on the edge of the ridge above them. It was dark but the sky was bright with stars and a sliver of moon, and he could see the pale light of it sliding across the mass of serpent hides as they swayed and shifted against each other, wing against wing, neck overarching neck as if they were a nest of taloned snakes. The scent of burnt oil and dust was in the air.
He spent several hours laying his calm over the serpents’ minds, promising them he would protect them from what was to come. By the time he climbed back down from the scarp sunrise was close and all about were the signs of a camp of warriors preparing for war.
Irissa was sitting on a log by a just kindled fire, leaning on her spear. She was dressed for war in a hardened battle vest but the look on her face when she saw him was not as fierce as usual. There was fear in it now and it made him doubly afraid for her. He walked cautiously to her fire.
‘So you are still going to fight?’ he said quietly.
‘It’s why I came.’ Her expression was guarded but he was encouraged that she didn’t tell him to go away.
‘Can I sit?’ he asked.
She shrugged. He stepped over the log, making sure there was a hand span of space between them. They sat in silence for a while, until he gathered the courage to speak.
‘I wish you wouldn’t fight,’ he said.
A hard smile twisted her mouth. ‘I knew that was why you were here. And why shouldn’t I fight? You are. You’re going in on those serpents.’
‘Yes, but —’
‘But you think you’re invincible.’
‘No. I think I could die,’ he said.
Surprise crossed her features. ‘And yet still you go. So why shouldn’t I?’
Tallis’s heart thumped and he slowly put his hand over hers on her leg. ‘Because I’d rather you lived,’ he said. She didn’t move. Her skin was warm and his hand was larger than hers, his fingertips brushing her thigh. He was seized with a sudden impulse to pull her into his arms.
‘I’m not afraid to die,’ she said. She was calm, determined. ‘You mustn’t stop me, Tallis.’
His heart turned in his chest. He could make her stay, with his power he could turn her will to his bidding — but he could not do that to her.
He pleaded with her. ‘Why are you so stubborn?’ he said. ‘Always, all our lives, you’ve been so stubborn.’
She smiled sadly. ‘Isn’t that why you love me, Tallis?’ She searched his face, a flicker of vulnerability in her eyes. He couldn’t answer. Of course he loved her, but to tell her now … She blinked, the hope fading from her eyes to be replaced with distance. She looked down at their hands and he thought she would pull hers away, but instead she turned her palm to face his and laced their fingers together, sighing long and slowly.
‘Ris …’ he whispered.
‘No. Don’t tell me it’s the wrong time,’ she said, ‘or that you cannot, that you are too different now, a descendant.’ Her lips thinned. ‘You are only afraid, but I am not.’ She turned to him. ‘You will be my heart mate one day. Jared always said that and I have always known it.’ She let go of his hand and picked up her spear, rising to her feet. ‘Hunt well, clansman,’ she said, looking at him expectantly.
Something was constricting his breath but Tallis managed to give her the reply she sought. ‘Find shade,’ he said, and she nodded and left him alone at the fire.
***
Rorc and Balkis were still bent over the table when Tallis entered the tent.
‘Tallis, come look at this,’ Rorc said.
Still dazed from his encounter with Irissa, he went to the table, giving Balkis a wary nod.
‘The serpents are calm?’ Balkis asked. His expression too was cautious.
‘As best they can be.’
‘Good. It’s a shame we don’t have Asrith as well. Do the others know where she is?’
‘No.’ Tallis shook his head. ‘She must be a long way off; I can’t feel her. I think Shaan must have sent her somewhere.’
‘Perhaps she sent her back to Ivar,’ Rorc said.
‘Could be.’
‘Or she’s joined Azoth,’ Balkis said quietly.
‘We will make do with what we have.’ Rorc sent him a cautioning look.
‘Will we be leaving at first light?’ Tallis asked. ‘Azoth knows exactly where we are; it will be too easy, like spearing rats in a crevice.’
Rorc’s lips narrowed. ‘I doubt we can hide from him wherever we go, but no, I won’t march five hundred fighters against a force of ten thousand, it would be suicide. We need the Clans. I’m sending Attar on Haraka to Hashmael — now that you’ve calmed the serpents he should be able to ride one.’
‘And what if they don’t come in time?’
‘Hashmael will get here,’ Rorc said.
‘I should go and find him then,’ Tallis said. ‘I’ll be faster, I know the land.’
‘No. I need you here. You must keep our serpents loyal — you said yourself the closer he gets, the harder it will become for them. And whatever you might say, you need to rest. When was the last time you slept?’
Tallis shook his head. He couldn’t remember.
‘Go and fight with that clanswoman, Irissa,’ Balkis suggested. ‘She’ll tire you out.’
Tallis sighed and shook his head. ‘She already did.’ He turned away, heading for the tent flap.
‘You’ll be the first to know when Attar returns,’ Rorc said.
‘I’ll know before he gets here,’ he replied, and made his way to his mother’s tent on the edge of the old orchard. Mailun had lit a fire and was cooking pan bread on a flat stone she’d placed in the coals.
‘Hungry?’ She passed him a round of bread.
He took it without speaking and sat on the ground. Mailun continued cooking, watching the thin rounds of bread puff and turn brown, then stacking them on a wooden plank. He felt Haraka launch from the scarp and looked up to see him wing away, speeding toward the Clans.
‘We’re waiting for Hashmael?’ Mailun asked.
‘Attar has gone to see how close they are.’ Tallis turned the bread around in his hands then threw it back on the stack. ‘We are easy targets, sitting here waiting for slaughter,’ he said.
Mailun slapped another round of bread on the hot stone, squinting as a sudden breeze blew smoke in her face. ‘Would you rather wait for slaughter in the open sand?’
‘No, but —’ A sudden sharp tug in his mind stopped his words and he scrambled to his feet.
‘What is it?’ Mailun said, but he couldn’t answer. His insides felt suddenly taut as he sensed the coming of a host of serpent minds. Pain throbbed in his skull and the salt metal tang of blood coated his tongue. There was a moment of stillness, of silence, and then the Hive came. Like a wave of water rushing across the sands their combined presence reached out before them and hit him in an explosion of energy and power, rocking him on his feet. Trying to catch his breath he swayed and gasped as he pulled desperately on the darkness inside, drawing it up and pushing back against the overwhelming sense of Azoth’s Hive, holding it at bay like a net against snakes. He could hear Marathin and the other serpents screaming in his mind.
Control! he shouted to them. I’m coming.
‘Tallis!’ Mailun was on her feet, a hand on his back and fear in her voice. He turned to her and she recoiled. ‘Your eyes!’ she said. He knew they must have darkened, blackening to night as the power filled him.
‘Go and tell Rorc that Azoth has crossed the mountains,’ he said, and without waiting for her reply he ran toward the trail that led to the top of the scarp. Blood rushed through his veins like fire as he sprinted up the path, stones and earth skittering away benea
th his feet. In the camp the warriors rose to their feet and he heard Irissa call out, but he didn’t stop.
He gained the plateau and raced to the edge, past the startled rider on lookout duty. The serpents below were a milling nest of fear and fury and he reached out to them as he ran, pushing back at the dark energy of Azoth’s Hive.
Marathin!
Her green eyes were bright with anger. He comes, she hissed, then lashed out with her foreclaw at a young Isles serpent next to her. He couldn’t see them but he could feel them. In the east where the plains met the sky, against the backdrop of the shadow of the mountains, a great blot of darkness was coming toward them, a moving, shuddering mass like a storm settling on the earth.
The rider who had been on duty at the lookout came up behind him.
‘What is it?’ he asked, but Tallis only shook his head. The man would not be able to see them as he did. Not until they were closer; but how long would that be, a day? He closed his eyes, reached and called, Haraka!
The well of his power flowed to accommodate him, keeping Azoth’s Hive at bay as he searched for the male serpent.
Arak-ferish. Haraka’s ghosting whisper found him, and Tallis saw the golden-eyed serpent flying low over the sand toward an army of clansmen. Clan is close, the serpent said.
But were they close enough?
Hurry, he sent. Tell Attar that Azoth is coming.
Feel him. Haraka’s mind shiver was strong enough for Tallis to sense. Attar could probably feel it as well.
I’m protecting you, he sent. Bring the Clans.
The pounding of feet behind him told him his mother had gone to Rorc. He glanced around and saw his father and Balkis running toward him.
‘They’ve crossed?’ Rorc was breathing heavily from the run up the path.
‘I can’t see them,’ Balkis said.
‘Not yet, but I can feel them,’ Tallis said.
‘How far are the Clans?’ Rorc asked.
‘Haraka can see them now. They could be here by sunrise tomorrow.’
Rorc turned to Balkis. ‘Go down and get the fighters in order. We don’t want anyone to panic, especially the new recruits. An army that size will still take many hours to get here. And gather the captains in the tent. We need to change our plan.’
Balkis ran back the way he had come.
‘And what is the plan?’ Tallis said.
Rorc’s expression was urgent. ‘Can you still contact Haraka?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I need you to have him give Attar a message for Hashmael. I want him to cover as much ground as he can today and tonight but to stop before he reaches us.’
‘You want them to stop before they get here?’
‘Yes, but not too far off; close enough to reach us in a few hours but far enough away to be hidden. Azoth’s army is massive; it will be a long and cumbersome line of fighters, much longer than ours if we attack first only with those warriors we have here.’
‘But we are barely five hundred,’ Tallis said.
‘Yes, and it will look to Azoth like an easy victory. He will be complacent, and the small size of our army will allow me to draw him to attack on one side of his line, turning his force toward us.’
‘Hashmael will strike from the flank,’ Tallis said.
‘Yes.’ Rorc nodded. ‘He will take him by surprise with a much greater force and hopefully break Azoth’s line, causing chaos.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Scanorians are recalcitrant at the best of times. He will be hard-pressed to get control of them.’
Tallis was silent. The strategy was fraught with risk but it could work — or at least extend their chances of survival. ‘So tell me exactly what you want me to say.’
Rorc nodded. ‘We’ll keep it brief for the serpent’s sake.’ He pared his instructions down to a few words with a short description of his battle plan. Reaching out to Haraka, Tallis commanded him to pass it on to Attar.
Arak-ferish commands. The serpent’s whisper told him he understood the message.
‘It’s done?’ Rorc said.
‘Yes.’
The older man exhaled a relieved breath. ‘And what of Shaan?’ he said. ‘Do you feel her with Azoth?’
Tallis hesitated. ‘She’s with him, of that I’m sure, but …’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t feel her.’
‘That worries me,’ Rorc said.
‘She will not betray us,’ Tallis said. But though he longed to believe his own words, the doubt still lingered.
‘I hope you’re right,’ Rorc said. ‘If there is something she can do, some way she can weaken Azoth, it will be welcome. Even if we kill many in his army, how will we deal with the god himself?’
‘Perhaps the Four Lost Gods will come to our aid.’
‘Or their brother’s.’ Rorc put a hand on his arm. ‘Whatever happens, we can only do what we can. Come, we need to tell the captains and Balkis our plan.’ He pulled him away from the edge of the plateau and Tallis followed him back down to the camp.
Chapter 48
Tuon shifted on the log she was using as a seat and glanced again at the general’s tent a few yards away. Nilah, Morfessa and Veila had been in there with Amandine since they’d arrived at the army’s camp the evening before, and it was almost sunset now and still there was no word from them. She remembered the general. Rorc had sent her to him a few times looking for information. He was a hawk-nosed, stubborn man, with the leather-hard muscles of a life spent in the military and the temperament to match. She doubted he would be much impressed by anything Nilah would say.
‘Kaf?’ Ivar picked up the pot he had brewed on one of the soldiers’ fires.
‘No,’ she sighed, looking at the scroll unrolled across her lap, ‘unless it’s going to help me figure out what this means.’
‘I thought we already had,’ he said. ‘That’s the same scroll you’ve been puzzling over for two days.’
‘I know.’ Tuon frowned in frustration. ‘But it just doesn’t seem right; I feel like we’re missing something. Something important.’
Amandine had set up his army right across Merchants Pass, blocking all traffic. Grey tents housing the fifteen thousand men stretched in neat rows on either side of the road like stationary waves in a grey sea. The smell of frying meat and metal mixed with the acrid stench of smoke filled the air, but Tuon barely sensed any of it as she went over and over the Prophet’s phrases in her mind.
‘The stone once broken, opens the way to salvation. Sing through the darkness, sing her home.’ Tuon spoke the lines she’d memorised from another scroll. ‘The darkness, Ivar, what does it mean? There’s something there, as if breaking the Stone is linked to it somehow, linked to Shaan.’
Ivar sipped from a cup of kaf. ‘Night?’ he said.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s something more. I feel like it’s linked to this passage.’ She pointed at the scroll on her lap and read one of the lines: ‘Lost to the splitting, retrieved by the ring, sing for her bane and recast all things.’ She stared at it. ‘Lost to the splitting — don’t you think that must be the splitting of the Birthstone?’
‘It seems it could be,’ Ivar said. ‘But what ring? The only one I know the Prophet might speak of was his own, and that was held by my brother.’
‘And taken by Azoth,’ Tuon said. Her hand clenched to a fist as she remembered the night at the Pepino when Azoth had come with Shaan and killed Torg for the ring. He had forced Shaan to use it to retrieve the Birthstone. It was now locked in a storage room in Salmut in the Temple of Amora.
‘But what else would be retrieved by it?’ she said.
Ivar was frowning. ‘Perhaps not just what but from where,’ he said. ‘From where did the ring retrieve the Birthstone?’
Tuon paused, a cold, creeping feeling filling her belly. ‘The Void,’ she whispered, and suddenly the words, the separate phrases the Prophet had written, came together in her mind, and she stared in horror at the scroll. Could she be right in her thoughts? Would Shaan splitti
ng the Stone exact a price they had not seen? Hands shaking, she rolled up the scroll. She had to tell Veila, they must send a message, or better yet she should go to Shaan and tell her.
‘Ivar,’ she said, but he was on his feet, looking up at the sky.
‘Look —’ he pointed east, ‘— a serpent!’
Tuon stared into the dark blue of early evening. The unmistakable shape of a serpent was flying toward them, and they weren’t the only ones to notice. A few other shouts rang out and men were on their feet or coming out of tents, gazing up at the sky.
Ivar’s face was taut with concentration.
‘Do you know which it is?’ she said. ‘Is it one of ours?’
‘It’s Asrith. I hear her in my mind. We must fetch the others. She has much to tell.’
Tuon turned but Alezo, who had come up silently behind them, was already on his way to the command tent.
‘Come.’ Ivar touched her arm. ‘She’ll land on the outskirts of the camp.’
They headed down through the soldiers’ tents and were soon joined by Alezo with Amandine, Nilah, Veila and Morfessa.
‘You’re sure it’s Asrith?’ Veila said as they caught up to them.
‘Yes,’ Ivar answered.
Amandine stared up at the oncoming serpent, then glared at Ivar. ‘She’s one of the Isles serpents? You’re sure of it?’
‘Of course.’
Amandine turned to one of his captains, who was striding beside him. ‘Bring a contingent of men, just in case.’
‘It is not necessary,’ Ivar said. ‘She won’t hurt you.’
‘Just like the serpents of Salmut?’ Amandine turned away.
Alezo spoke to the Seducers, Sinan and Bernal, who had joined them. ‘Fetch Devin,’ he said, ‘and meet us where the serpent lands. You two make sure no man there makes any attempt to attack the serpent.’
‘Good idea,’ Morfessa said as they all followed Amandine. ‘These men are too ready for a fight.’
Alezo’s frown showed that he agreed, and he had the other men keep close on either side of them as they made their way through the tents. A group of twenty soldiers had already assembled on the dusty plain with swords and bows held at the ready, the general motionless among them as Asrith came down. Wings spread she glided, kicking up dust and small stones as her talons met the earth. Nilah clutched Tuon’s arm as she put up a hand to shield her face. Ivar stepped toward the serpent, Veila a few steps behind.