by David Hair
‘You’re a natural,’ he said, making her heart soar. ‘I think you’re ready for this next task.’
He took her back to the triangular arch and bade her lay her right hand on it, then he placed his fingers over hers and said, ‘Close your eyes and concentrate on the sensation of touch.’ She did so, conscious of Banno and the others watching curiously. Adefar, in fox-cub form, perched on her shoulder, watching avidly.
With an effort, she managed to shut out her awareness of them all and declared herself ready.
‘Good. Now call Adefar into yourself and trace Flux, the energy rune,’ he commanded.
She traced the rune in pale light, which made the watching men murmur, and as she did so, her soul seemed to swell inside her. ‘Done,’ she muttered, gazing at her father’s hand on hers.
‘Good. Now, feel the heat of my palm on the back of your hand. Sense the roughness of the timber beneath your fingers. Listen and feel, Zarelda,’ he repeated, then he broke off and muttered something in the runic tongue. She tried to follow his words, but lost track and reverted to doing as he bade her and just feeling.
After a moment she realised a current was flowing from him into her and on into the timber. The wood was beginning to vibrate faintly.
‘Do you feel that?’ he murmured. ‘I need you to take over. Adefar is already part of the chain, so all you need do is maintain the same low, slow energy.’
The strange thrumming sensation was now permeating her entire body. ‘Yes, I feel it!’
‘Good. Get to know it – become it.’
She did as her father said, and as she attuned all her awareness to it, the world dropped away.
‘Now,’ Raythe said, ‘you take control.’
That was harder, but there it was: energy crackled through her into the wood.
‘Well done.’ Raythe removed his hand, but the current went on flowing through her and into the timber. ‘Any sorcerer for miles can now sense us, but don’t hurry – getting it right is the most important thing. Take your time: you’ve got all day.’
‘All day?’ she blurted. ‘What if I need to pee?’
Her father chuckled. ‘You can walk away for a few minutes and the connection will stay live. Just relax – there’s nothing you need to do that’s more important to the expedition than this.’
She felt a thrill of pride and anxiety, but she pushed it away to focus on the task. Everything else faded into the background. She dimly sensed her father depart for the other side of the bay once more, although Jesco remained. Sometime around mid-afternoon, she came out of her trance to find herself wrapped in a blanket, with Banno sitting nearby, watching protectively, and she felt an even greater sense of rightness.
I’m doing this: I’m becoming who I always wanted to be.
The exhilaration carried her through the day.
*
‘Do you feel that, Captain Hawkstone?’ Toran Zorne’s voice, usually so monotonous, rose fractionally in surprise. It was the most animation Larch Hawkstone had ever heard from the Ramkiseri agent.
‘I feel nothing,’ the Borderer captain answered, puzzled, looking around the forecastle of the frigate, one of the two ships Zorne had requisitioned. The frigate was equipped with a dozen bombards, iron-barrelled cylinders designed to propel metal balls packed with explosive powder for hundreds of yards; the second vessel, a troop-carrier, was packed with Hawkstone’s men and a contingent of Bolgravian marines.
Zorne had made the frigate his flagship, leaving Hawkstone on the troopship with the men, but that evening, when they’d moored in a sheltered bay beneath the distinctive peak of Mount Burarath, Hawkstone had been summoned to join Zorne.
‘Someone is drawing heavily on the praxis,’ Zorne intoned, pointing west along the coast.
Although well aware that all Ramkiseri were sorcerers as well as implacable killers, Hawkstone found the reminder unnerving. Goosebumps rising, he murmured, ‘If it’s Vyre, he’s ahead of us.’
Zorne considered this. He seldom consulted with anyone, not even the two Bolgravian sorcerers the governor had loaned him. Hawkstone couldn’t read his moods; in fact, he was becoming increasingly sure that humanity was just as much a mystery to Zorne as the Ramkiseri was to them. He behaved as if everything was black and white, a strange flaw in this world of grey duplicity.
‘Tomorrow we will sail towards it,’ Zorne announced. ‘If it is Vyre, well and good: it means we will have found him. If it isn’t, then he’s still behind us.’ He looked up at the mountain. ‘After the delays, storms and contrary winds, I hoped to find them here – this mountain range looks impassable to me. If they’ve bypassed it, how?’
Hawkstone peered around. ‘Perhaps there’s a track inland?’
‘Perhaps,’ Zorne echoed, leaning against the rail with the sea breeze stirring his hair. Since taking to sea, he’d let his hair and beard grow.
Sailors of the Bolgravian Navy were traditionally bearded; Hawkstone wondered if perhaps Zorne wished to blend in.
The under-komisar pondered the shore, then straightened. ‘We have two hours of daylight. Have the captain lower the coracle. You and I will go ashore and seek clues of Vyre’s whereabouts.’
*
Hawkstone shipped his oars as the boat grounded on the gravel shore and the sailor they’d brought with them, a dour man named Trimble who constantly chewed a wad of redleaf, steadied the boat so Hawkstone and Zorne could disembark. Hawkstone sucked in his breath as the frigid water covered his knees, but the Ramkiseri agent didn’t even flinch.
Still, Zorne had mucked in, rowing just as hard as Trimble and Hawkstone, and now, without a word, he helped haul the boat up the beach with no airs of rank or superiority.
‘Wait here,’ he told Trimble.
‘How do we climb up?’ Hawkstone asked, gazing up the rugged cliffs overhanging the bay.
‘We don’t need to,’ the Bolgrav replied, striding towards a rocky outcrop battered smooth by the sea; rubble was piled at the base. ‘Wait there,’ he said, raising his hands and weaving patterns with his fingers while muttering a torrent of strange words. The air hissed and shimmered and shadows danced along the broken cliff-face. For a minute, nothing happened – then the pile of boulders crumbled and Hawkstone found himself staring at time-worn steps and what might even be an arch in the stone face.
Zorne’s face took on a fleeting look of satisfaction. ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘Mount Burarath is a former Aldar stronghold.’
Hawkstone made the Gerda sign to ward off evil.
‘I saw regularity in the shape of the stone, albeit distorted by time,’ Zorne added, before resuming his spell-work, which sent the rocks blocking the tunnel flowing down and into the waves, revealing a dark opening. ‘It’s been blocked from within and concealed by rockfalls,’ he intoned calmly, as if this were a daily event for him. Maybe it was.
Real Aldar artefacts could fetch thousands, although markets were filled with fakes, gulling the unwary. Greed warred with fear in Hawkstone’s chest, but Zorne didn’t hesitate.
‘Let us see what’s to be seen,’ he said, conjuring a glowing orb of light about his left hand and leading the way up the stairs.
Hawkstone glanced back at the two ships floating offshore. Even from that distance he could see the decks were lined with watching men. Then he looked up at Zorne, already at the arch, and started after him, knowing he had little choice but to follow.
Once inside, Zorne’s glowing orb provided illumination enough to proceed up more ancient stairs. There was even an old handrail carved with flowery flourishes and curves, and at the top, a hall with rooms on either side was strewn with the wreckage of broken pottery which looked well picked over.
‘It’s been looted before,’ Hawkstone observed, disappointed.
‘That’s to be expected,’ Zorne replied, unmoved. ‘Come.’
He led them along the hall and up another stair, wider and more ornately decorated, but also more damaged, as if someone had been so offended by t
he beauty that they had to destroy what they could. Hawkstone saw him occasionally trace a swirl with his fingers. Then they reached a giant chamber filled with layers of silt and dust.
Hawkstone started. ‘Wheel ruts – and recent, too.’
Zorne knelt and studied the line of a wagon’s passage through the detritus. ‘Vyre’s people are travelling west.’
They followed the tracks, stopping now and then to examine their surroundings, until they reached another hall where they could see daylight ahead of them, revealing two giant doors opening out over a wooded valley.
‘They passed through the whole blasted mountain,’ Hawkstone breathed.
‘An act of some courage – or perhaps desperation,’ Zorne replied. ‘They are motivated by more than just escape. There are a dozen vales east of here where a viable settlement could have been established if they merely sought a home outside imperial jurisdiction. But they are pressing on.’
‘To Verdessa?’
‘To wherever Gospodoi’s mission went,’ Zorne predicted. ‘He travelled into the Verdessan hinterland and I’ll warrant that is where Vyre is going. Come, let us retrace our path.’
Winding back through the darkness, they passed the hall they’d first entered, then traced a long but relatively straightforward descent though the mountain until Zorne paused, staring at a wall. He muttered something and an arch appeared where there had just been stone.
‘An illusion, to hide this arch,’ Zorne commented. ‘And see, the seals are recently broken. Curious.’ He went through, Hawkstone reluctantly trailing behind him, into a chamber of murals. They had arcane symbols traced above, perhaps narrating the scenes.
‘Can you read those words?’ Hawkstone asked.
Zorne shook his head. ‘Only a scholar could do so.’ He raised his light orb and walked on, past increasingly lurid murals, although he didn’t appear to notice them much. ‘Multiple languages are an inefficiency,’ he commented at last. ‘There should be only one language, written in one script. Everything else is a hindrance.’
‘Language makes us who we are,’ Hawkstone said. It was something his father used to say.
‘Dividing what should be one,’ Zorne droned. ‘One day, there will only be one people, one language, one culture, one empire. This is destiny and those who resist it are misguided. Do you understand?’
Not really, was the honest answer. But Hawkstone replied, ‘Aye, we should be united: by the sword,’ because it seemed the sort of thing to say.
‘If necessary, but war is also wasteful,’ Zorne replied, cocking his head. ‘Be silent.’ He listened to the air and Hawkstone could almost fancy he heard something whispering.
I hope I’m imagining that . . .
‘Follow,’ Zorne commanded, and although his feet dragged, Hawkstone did as he was bidden, down another set of steps and into a chamber that held a massive glass-lidded sarcophagus containing the bones of some ages-old figure.
An Aldar, Hawkstone guessed fearfully.
‘Someone found this recently – see, the dust is disturbed. One of Vyre’s people, I must presume,’ Zorne noted. ‘They took the death mask.’
Hawkstone shuddered. ‘Souvenir?’
‘Perhaps. This was a great lord or lady of the Aldar. His people hid his resting place, so they must have perished at the end of the Mizra Wars, knowing their age was no more and any public grave would surely be robbed. Ordinarily, the Aldar did not separate the living and the dead: one buried one’s kin in the family home.’
‘Heathens.’ Hawkstone made the sign against evil again.
Zorne raised the orb of light in his hand and surveyed the walls, then shrugged. ‘The Aldar are gone and so are their gods. They have nothing to teach us.’ He lowered his orb over the desiccated corpse until it touched the skeleton, which promptly ignited, burning with a hungry blue fire that swiftly engulfed the dried-up bones, tissue and cloth.
And he speaks of waste, Hawkstone thought. I’m right: he has no soul.
The Ramkiseri agent turned to the heathen murals, muttering words that caused the plastered walls to crumble and collapse in choking clouds. ‘Better such artefacts be lost,’ Zorne intoned, and started striding back to the main passage again.
Hawkstone stumbled along behind, completely lost, but Zorne led him without error back to the shoreline, where Trimble waited, sitting on the rim of the boat, still mechanically chewing his redleaf.
Not all men would have stayed at their post after sunset on a dark and hostile shore. Zorne gave him a small nod of the head. ‘Trimble, yes?’
‘Signalman Moss Trimble, sir,’ the sailor mumbled.
‘You have done your duty,’ Zorne told him, likely his highest words of praise. He turned back to Hawkstone. ‘As Vyre’s people have passed through here, I must presume it is his use of praxis I have sensed. They’re within one hundred miles of us, northwest of this place. We set sail at first light. We should find them within two days.
‘And then?’
‘They will be wiped out.’
Hawkstone faltered, ‘There are families with him . . . women, children.’ And one of them was Angrit, the mother of his daughter, Rosebud. He’d been paying gild, right up until she vanished. ‘Surely they deserve mercy—’
Zorne looked puzzled. ‘Laws must be upheld, Captain Hawkstone. We must exterminate them all. It is our duty.’
*
‘This is it,’ Raythe muttered, sighting through the triangle on the eastern shore to Zar’s identical structure on the western promontory. They might look the same outwardly, but the spells on the far gate were less complex: it was really just a net for catching whatever passed through this gate and stripping it of nebulum, returning it to its natural state.
He’d spent a full day building on the able work Kemara had done readying the timber, spending hours chanting instructions, tracing myriad runes from every discipline of the praxis.
Only a Master sorcerer could do such a thing. And I can do this, he reminded himself.
Everyone was watching; they all knew there was no going forward unless he got this exactly right, and likely no going back.
He took his time, checking and double-checking all the calculations with Varahana, but at last the moment could be delayed no longer.
Right . . . He put on thin gloves before reaching into his belt-pouch to retrieve a small corked pot. He broke the wax seal to reveal about a thimble-full of crimson istariol; it smelled like ammonia. Adding water, he churned it to a paste, then began daubing it onto the frame while everyone watched anxiously. It took five minutes to use up every grain.
Time was of the essence now. He pushed aside his compulsion to recheck everything, knowing that was just procrastination, and spread his hands, shouting, ‘Cognatus, spiratus igneous; spiratus aerium, qesta mei imperandi!’
His sight blurred, showing him shapes and shadows rushing in, inhuman eyes and mouths painted across the air like shifting watercolours. Those watching in perplexed silence saw nothing as he bound these lesser spirits to the gate, but when he ignited the istariol, there was a gasp of awe as the space inside the portal wavered – and now anything seen through it looked milky and distorted.
He sucked in his breath, but it held . . .
So far, so good. Without taking his eyes from the now shimmering, fire-fringed arch, he called to Jesco and Vidar, ‘First, the barrel.’
The two men rolled an empty wine barrel forward and positioned it in front of the arch. On his signal, they pushed it gently through the gap. It sparkled as the glistening film suspended in the arch ate it up – and it vanished. Everyone held their breath as Varahana put Raythe’s spyglass to her eye and looked across the bay.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
Across the bay, a torch ignited and waved: the signal of success.
‘They’ve got it – they’ve got it,’ Varahana called.
‘Yes,’ Raythe breathed.
Jesco and Vidar whooped, and the watching travellers burst into ch
eers – then Jesco recklessly stepped through the arch himself. Raythe froze in alarm, his gaze flying to Varahana: this was not what they’d planned.
The next three seconds felt like a lifetime – until Varahana shouted, ‘He’s made it—’ adding under her breath, ‘the bloody idiot.’
Her words brought a fresh cheer from the watchers, as well as audible relief: the magic gateway worked.
‘And Jesco just got out of all the hard work,’ Vidar noted.
‘He’ll be busy enough on the far side,’ Raythe replied, ‘and he’s answered the question everyone was afraid to ask: it’s quite safe for the living. Get them moving, Vidar: this gate won’t burn for ever.’
In moments, the beach became a hive of activity. A dozen men had already clambered around the cliffs, ready to pull the gear and people through the other gate. Those young women and children fit enough to cross the river had also set off, leaving the able-bodied adults to start pushing the wagons through the arch one by one. Gravis’ brewing wagon was first, followed by the grain stores, then Varahana herded her Sisters through, waving as she vanished. A sense of accomplishment grew as the minutes passed without mishap, but so too did the apprehension as each new traveller readied themselves for their turn to face the gate.
Raythe was maintaining the flow of energy, but he was worried the istariol was being consumed too quickly; he still wasn’t certain everyone would get through.
The horses were skittish, sensing the thrumming energies; they had to be blindfolded and manhandled through. The minutes were passing and the istariol fires fuelling the arch were burning ever lower.
‘Go, go!’ Raythe urged those remaining. ‘Get the rest through – hurry!’
Then Vidar gripped his shoulder and pointed east. ‘Raythe,’ he murmured, ‘two ships just rounded the headland.’
Raythe turned, his heart leaping to his mouth, to see a frigate off the point. Behind it was a vessel with high sides: undoubtedly a troopship. Both ships were flying the Imperial Blessed Orb.
Damn it, they’ve found us – at the worst possible moment. And we’re so close!