by David Hair
She looked at him blankly. ‘I’m just a woman.’
Raythe laughed. ‘You were never just that.’
He left her with that thought and limped back until he found Vidar’s body. Steeling himself, he checked for a pulse – and sagged in relief when he actually found one. I’ve lost Tami, but I haven’t lost Vidar. Thank you, Deo, if you’re listening. Which I can’t imagine you are, being imaginary . . .
He straightened and peered towards the hill-fort, a shadowy silhouette beneath the rings.
Of course, I may have lost everyone else . . .
Then shouts rang out and he saw Gravis Tavernier leading a straggling line of villagers, mostly women and children, onto the bridge. They stopped abruptly, gaping at the carnage in blank horror.
‘Who’s there?’ Gravis called shakily, seeing their silhouettes.
‘It’s me, Raythe Vyre. What are you doing here?’
‘Jesco told us to come while he held the rear,’ Gravis panted, then turned and called, ‘It’s okay: it’s Lord Vyre – thank Gerda, he’s cleared our way!’
A ragged cheer rose from the Teshveld folk appearing, bearing their possessions. They stared at him and Kemara, and he noted how many were also making signs against evil.
‘Kemara, Vidar’s hurt,’ Raythe murmured. ‘Could you tend him, please? I need to direct things, and—’
‘—and you know krag-all about healing,’ she finished for him.
‘Quite. And I have to find Zar and see what’s happened back at the fort, and—’
‘Yes, yes,’ she snorted, ‘go on, Lord Vyre – I’ll clean up after you. I’m used to it by now.’
If she was softening, it was imperceptible – but when their eyes met, there was definitely something new there. Perhaps she’d read his soul the way he’d read hers and not hated what she saw either . . .
But they could explore that later. For now, she was already bending over Vidar, while he began directing his people’s efforts, as the now familiar weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders once again. There was a lot to do if they were to survive the night, after all. He pulled aside the first group of villagers and set them to work. ‘Throw the Bolgravians into the river, then get yourselves across the bridge.’
As he passed him, he clapped Gravis Tavernier on the shoulder: it was the old miscreant’s knock on the door that had started all this, after all. The sky had cleared and ringlight illuminated the majestic bridge and the ruins beyond, beneath the impossible floating Aldar castle, tethered by those massive chains.
Vashtariel’s city . . . and the greatest motherlode of istariol ever known, if the tales are true.
Then he looked back towards the hill-fort and muttered a prayer that those he loved would make it safely here.
Epilogue
Over the bridge
The sun rose far away above the eastern ranges, and Raythe squinted from his vantage atop the gatehouse overlooking the great bridge that had brought them to this refuge.
At least, I hope it’s a refuge and not a death-trap.
Almost everyone was in now: Jesco, Elgus and Varahana had arrived with the rearguard after some kind of action at the hill-fort that he’d not yet been able to get to the bottom of. Jesco and Varahana were certain Elgus had planned betrayal, but the knight was bluffly adamant that he’d tricked the Bolgravs to buy them a chance at survival.
‘You can’t argue with results,’ he’d said heartily.
Well, you can if they’re accidental and you intended the opposite, Raythe thought, but proof was another matter. Still, he was used to watching his back.
But he couldn’t rest: not with Zarelda and Banno still missing.
He prayed they’d gone off to be alone and now found themselves cut off. They’ll rejoin us soon, he kept telling himself, but sleep was impossible, which was why he was sitting on the gatehouse, watching the dawn.
‘Raythe,’ drawled Jesco, whose post it was, ‘get some beauty sleep, will you?’
‘Too late for that.’
The Shadran looked him over and grinned. ‘Oh, not a complete lost cause,’ he purred. ‘Did you know that we’ve taken on extra hands? It was Hawkstone who let us through the cordon. He’s down below now.’
‘Larch Hawkstone? From Teshveld?’
‘The very same,’ Jesco chuckled. ‘He got himself half-killed in the process, but he’s been reunited with his family.’
‘He has a family here?’
‘A daughter, by one of Gravis’ women – Angrit. Young Rosebud is ecstatic, but Angrit is . . . well, less so, but stranger things have happened.’ Jesco twinkled. ‘Like you and the handsome Kemara, perhaps?’
‘Ha! There goes your credibility.’
‘Don’t deny you admire her,’ Jesco chuckled. ‘That’s plain for all to see.’
‘Admire, yes, but it’s hardly mutual – and there’s a long way from admire to desire.’
‘Not in my book,’ Jesco laughed. ‘I’ll say no more, just mark my words.’
‘I look forward to throwing them in your face for years to come.’
They faced the dawn, admiring the way the rose-gold light streaked the majestic ruins, rippling in the river below, lighting up the verdant swathe of vines that entangled the lower reaches and glittering on the floating rock above.
Then the light struck the ground on the far side of the bridge and they caught their breath.
There was an army there, ranked and waiting – but not an army like Raythe had ever seen before. Every man looked to be in boiled-leather armour. Their skin was almost as black as their hair and their weapons were strangely primitive – he couldn’t see a flintlock among them, just halberds, spears and bows. Strange banners flew above them, long triangular pennants in the brightest yellows, reds, blues and greens. And some were mounted on phorus birds.
Amid them brightly clad, masked women passed among the lines, messengers or maybe officers, it was hard to say, while others clustered around a throne set above the defile overlooking the dragon statues and the bridge.
On it sat a white-faced figure in scarlet robes. Raythe drew out his little telescope, focused it on the enthroned leader and shivered. Whoever it was wore an Aldar mask.
Then he saw someone kneeling before the throne and he gasped in horror at the sight of his daughter, her head bared, with a halter around her neck.
Dear Gerda, he groaned inside. They’ve got Zarelda . . .
*
Zar woke to numbness. ‘Ha . . . wha . . .’ she mumbled, opening her eyes, blinking up at orange torchlight. There was a strange taste in her mouth and her chin throbbed hotly, but she was shivering with cold.
She was lying on her back. Dark silhouettes looming over her resolved into a sitting figure: a young woman with a dark visage and a tattooed chin. Rima, she remembered. The Tangato woman was sitting cross-legged beside her left shoulder, gazing down at her solemnly. ‘Koni’ka modoru,’ she said gently.
Without Adefar, Zar had no idea what she meant, but it felt like Welcome back.
On her other side sat an old man with a shock of white hair, wearing a skirt of flax. His face was completely covered in the Tangato patterns, as were his bare shoulders and his white-haired chest. He had deep brown eyes that bored into hers, but it wasn’t a fierce or frightening face – there were many laughter lines.
He must be Hetaru . . .
Zar suddenly remembered and jerked her head up, crying, ‘Banno – Banno?’ Her speech came out slurred.
Have they drugged me?
Rima laid a hand on her shoulder and her eyes gleamed as she channelled her familiar. Her mizra familiar . . . Then the Tangato woman said in Magnian, ‘Your man is in the next dwelling. He is safe, and so are you.’
Safe . . . where is safe here?
Zar tried to sit up and realising that she was naked beneath the feather cloak, clutched it to her chest. ‘What about my father, and my people?’ she asked, shaking off her lethargy.
‘Safe, for now,’
Rima told her. ‘You will see. Shiazar is coming to take you there.’
‘Shiazar?’
‘You have met her – she is the empress of our people.’
She remembered the imperious masked woman of the previous night and shuddered.
An empress . . . Have we just traded one evil empire for another?
Hetaru made a comment to Rima, then rose and left. The Tangato woman studied her face and said, ‘It becomes you.’
The sudden dread that struck Zar crystallised when Rima handed her a polished metal disk. She lifted it and saw her reflection: a skinny, pale-faced girl with black marks etched into her chin. They were still raw, a pattern of spirals and swirls that looked menacing and savage.
‘What have you done to me?’ she whispered in a cracked voice.
‘It is a great honour,’ Rima told her. ‘And necessary, to protect you. Now all know you are one of us: a mahotsu-kai of the Tangato.’
*
An hour later, Zar was made to kneel before the throne of Shiazar, Great Queen of Earthly Paradise, Guardian of Death’s Threshold, Empress of the Tangato and Serene Divinity of Light, to name but a few of her titles, who sat above her, conferring with her war chief, Kamo, and Hetaru, her high priest.
‘One of us’ or not, Zar was leashed round the neck like a pet – or a prisoner.
But Adefar was inside her, translating, and ready for more when the time was right. However, when she tried conjuring energy to loosen the leash, the cord itself resisted, and Rima looked at her sharply, shaking her head. She was standing proudly in her feather cloak and little else, more warrior than woman, holding the halter around Zar’s neck.
Realising her praxis had been limited, Zar stopped struggling and listened instead.
‘Their leader is a sorcerer,’ Hetaru was saying. ‘We must proceed with caution.’
‘But we have his daughter,’ Kamo retorted impatiently. ‘If he doesn’t surrender, kill her.’
‘His daughter belongs to me,’ Hetaru replied mildly. ‘No one will harm she whom the gods have blessed.’
Shiazar silenced them with a gesture. ‘You claim her, Hetaru: but can a paleskin really be blessed? Or is she the servant of some nisokami, come to spread evil?’
Nisokami – false god. Zarelda caught her breath as the import struck her. I’m not safe, for all Rima’s assurances. Shiazar could strip me of Hetaru’s protection, and then what?
She looked up at Rima and saw worry in her eyes.
Oh Gerda . . . Blinking back tears, Zar stared across the ravine to the distant figures on the gatehouse roof and whispered, ‘Father, please, get me out of this.’
THE END
Acknowledgements
New series! New hopes, new dreams. New characters to haunt my sleep (or rather, lack of it). New lives to vicariously live, and new rules to play by. Let’s do this, Bradley!
Thanks to: Jo Fletcher and the team at JFB and Quercus (especially Molly Powell), for their faith in this series and my writing. Thank you to super-agent Heather Adams for linking us all up (and thanks also to her husband and partner in crime, Mike Bryan).
Thanks to test readers (regular faces Kerry Greig, Heather Adams and Paul Linton, plus a big thank you and welcome to Lee Murray (check out Lee’s writing at https://www.leemurray.info/) for their guidance and unflinching opinions. Also thanks to my nearest and dearest, especially my children, Brendan and Melissa, my parents, Cliff and Biddy, my sister Robyn, and all my friends – you know who you are.
But most of all, thanks to my wonderful, patient wife, Kerry, for sharing the highs and helping me through the lows. And of course, hello to Jason Isaacs. Tinkety-tonk and down with the Nazis.
David Hair
New Zealand
January 2020
Read on for an extract from Book Two in
The Tethered Citadel Trilogy
WORLD’S EDGE
Prologue: The Long Road Home
He woke to the sound and feel of words, tumbling from his own mouth, and realised from the dry rawness of his throat that he’d been babbling ‘Ruscht, consano, consano a multo, quaeso, lanista . . .’ for hours.
Ruscht – heal me, heal me of it all, I beg you . . . over and over.
And the familiar had been dutifully doing so.
I’m alive . . .
Abruptly he fell silent and just listened to the churning of the river, the moan of wind in trees, the call of birds, the hum of insects and the painful rasping of his own breath. Then taste returned, the bitter tang of blood and river water in his mouth; the smell of damp earth permeated his nostrils.
Then came pain, the agonising damage to his torso, punctured skin and the rending that steel had wrought on flesh – and the exquisite torture of even the subtlest movement. He knew his own body well enough to know that despite waking, survival still hung by a thread.
The worst pain of all, though, was the bitter ache of defeat. He’d been cast down, hurled into the gorge and washed up here to die alone.
But I am Toran Zorne, Under-Komizar of the Ramkiseri, and I am never alone. My empire is with me.
That reminder, that pride, rekindled his endurance. He opened his eyes and found himself wallowing in the shallows of a sluggish river, half in and half out of the current. He crawled forward and collapsed on the stony shore beneath high cliffs.
A river that carries traces of istariol, he remembered.
A river that soon became a lake, that became a glacier, that inched towards the sea before becoming another lake, then another river, flowing through Verdessa into the sea . . . a miraculous journey, possible only through the strange geography of Shamaya, where a motherlode of istariol could create pockets of benign, life-supporting climate, even hundreds of miles inside the frozen wastes.
Fragments of memory had started returning. He knew how he’d got here – his last coherent memory was of Raythe Vyre, off his feet and surely dying, and yet somehow the bastard had managed to plunge his sword into his gut.
Toran Zorne rolled over, peeled away the sodden material and examined the wound, still livid, but newly sealed. It should have been fatal, maybe not instantly, but in the hours afterwards. He should have been bleeding out while lying unconscious in the water.
But I have you, Ruscht, and you have kept me alive.
This wasn’t unheard of, a familiar keeping their host-sorcerer alive, even without instructions. Familiar spirits might not be terribly intelligent, but some things stuck in their wayward minds, and uppermost of those was that the human they’d bonded to must not die. And if there was one thing Ruscht was well-practised at, it was putting his master back together again.
‘Abeo, Ruscht,’ Zorne breathed. Rest now.
The familiar squirmed in pleasure at his approval, then left his body. Magic – even unconscious magic – was draining, and what they both needed above all was to rest. As the invisible spirit vanished, Zorne rolled back to the river’s edge, lapped at the water until his thirst dissolved, then closed his eyes and let the tranquil sounds sweep him away into darkness.
*
When he woke again, it felt like the following morning. He found Ruscht inside him again, unable to stay away, and the wound, while still painful, was binding up, thanks to the familiar’s presence. Using magic to heal others might be nigh on impossible, but repairing oneself was easier. He clambered to his feet and scouted the area until he found a bit of a trail along the river beneath the cliffs. It took him up and out of the ravine to a low rise at the south end of a plateau. After a while, he managed to get his bearings: he’d been here before, just a few days ago.
He’d been Moss Trimble then, one of the three hundred souls the infamous Raythe Vyre had led here, searching for istariol. A simple man, Trimble had been, with base habits. As Trimble, he’d been courting the midwife, Kemara Solus, while trying to get close enough to plunge a stiletto into her black mizra-heart.
Her familiar saved her, just as Ruscht has now saved me . . . but hers pulled her back
from having her heart impaled – and then turned her into a killing machine.
Such was the potency of a mizra-witch – and if she was one, so Raythe Vyre must be too. It wasn’t through cunning or skill they’d stayed one step ahead of the empire, but through the deepest evil known.
It occurred to Zorne that for the first time in his life, he was outmatched.
That notion haunted him all morning as he walked north, staying low to the ground, moving from copse to dell towards an impossible city that grew against the northern skyline. Rath Argentium: a place he’d never believed existed, let alone thought might have survived the Ice Age. But there it was: Shiro Kamigami, the dreaded citadel of the god-kings, chained and floating above the Silver City. It could be no other.
*
Finally he was close enough to see the camp his Bolgravian allies had made before assailing Vyre’s position, a hill-fort at the edge of the ravine.
As he drew closer, a chill shuddered up his spine.
The Bolgrav camp was utterly destroyed, as if a hurricane had blown through it. The bodies of the soldiers were strewn everywhere, lying where they’d fallen, being picked over by thousands of vultures and dozens of the giant flightless phorus birds they’d thought were extinct or even mythic. But there were men present too, brown-skinned, with black hair, carrying what looked to be basic spears and clubs, who were calmly looting the camp. Remarkably, they were being directed by garishly robed women, some of whom were actually riding the giant birds.
They’ve destroyed an entire Bolgravian regiment . . . but who are they?
Shocked to the core, he circled the destroyed camp before heading for the bridge that crossed the ravine to Rath Argentium. He found a low hill where he could survey a troubling scene: arrayed on this side of the bridge, thousands more of the strange warriors were facing the city. They were singing and beating their chests and shaking their weapons, but making no direct attack.
He could see the bridge, where the demonic pair had slain four imperial sorcerers and forced Zorne to throw himself into the river. The greatest concentration of warriors was there, facing across the span – and was that a throne? It was surrounded by bright banners and more people.