by Tim Stead
“Get behind me,” Serhan said.
“What?”
“Just do it. Trust me.”
Reluctantly he stepped back behind Serhan, leaving him as the bowman’s only target. The man stopped and raised the bow, only to be struck at that moment by several arrows from a mounted group of archers that had ridden up from the valley camp in answer to the summons. The man dropped dead, and his two companions, now only ten yards away stopped running.
“Put them down.” Serhan called. “Drop your weapons and you won’t be hurt.”
The men looked scared, but they did as they were told, and a moment later they were surrounded by armed men coming from all directions. They were seized and brought forward. They were both young, and in spite of their fear they were defiant.
“Why did you attack us,” Grand demanded.
“You’re thieves,” one of the hunters said. He was the bigger of the two.
“They should be executed, sir,” Grand’s sergeant said. “They tried to kill you.”
“You heard Captain Serhan give his word, sergeant,” Grand said. “They are to be spared, but I’d like to know why.” He turned to Serhan.
“I’ll explain later. I want to hear what they have to say.”
“Serhan?” the hunter said. “You are Cal Serhan?”
“Yes. Do you know me?”
“My cousin,” the hunter said. “He was with Bragga. Not of his own will. He came back to the village last week. You killed general Bragga?”
“Yes. He would not yield.”
“Then we are sorry for shooting at you. Bragga was a curse on all our lives. You lifted that curse.”
“You shot at us because you think we are thieves,” Serhan said impatiently.
“Yes, but you may take what you wish, Captain. The village is grateful.”
“Do you understand why Bragga’s band was broken up, why he died?”
“It does not matter.”
“Yes it does.” He turned to the troops. About sixty of them were gathered around now. “I want you all to understand why we killed Bragga, why we are making war on bandits. Just to know that it is done is not enough. These people,” he indicated the hunters, “and their families, are the people who feed us. We are not going to do things the old way any more. We will protect these people from bandits, and we will stop any new Bragga from arising. We will maintain peace. In return we expect the farmers to provide us with food, but we will not steal it. We will tell them in advance how much we need from each village, and we will expect it to be delivered to White Rock. With peace the land under cultivation will grow, and the population will grow, but we will not. Our needs will remain the same, so that as time passes the burden on each family will be less. This is how it will be.”
“Captain,” the hunter said. “Forever?”
“For as long as White Rock rules.”
“But what right have you to rule us?”
“You are brave to ask,” Serhan said. “I cannot answer you, other than to refer you to our lord Gerique of the Faer Karan.”
The hunter looked downcast, but then brightened. “You are trying to make things better for us,” he said. “I understand.”
“You will explain this to your village?”
“Yes, my lord.”
That caused a murmur throughout the assembled troops.
“I am not your lord,” Serhan said, very deliberately. “That privilege belongs to Gerique, who is the master of White Rock.”
“I understand,” the hunter said, but he smiled.
“What is your name,” Serhan asked.
“I am Carn san Rufus Barak,” the hunter said.
“You must make others understand, Carn. I would consider this a service.”
Grand considered the whole thing well done. The surviving hunters would be messengers for the new order that Serhan was trying to establish. He had used all his assets to sway the men, even those he was unaware of at the start of the interrogation. He had drawn in the guard, shown each side its advantage, and revealed the ultimate threat behind his words.
“I am sorry that your friend died here today,” Serhan went on. “The guard sought to protect their commanders, which is their purpose. It was an ill judged attack. Captain Grand,” he turned to Grand, almost formally. “Can you spare ten men to escort these men and their dead friend back to their village?”
“Of course.” It was a gesture. Get them used to seeing the guard doing something that wasn’t threatening. It was a good idea. He was beginning to understand the direction of Serhan’s strategy. The villagers were friends, and should be respected. The bandits were misguided, and should be warned or redirected, but tolerance would go only so far. Darius would not have been so gentle with either party.
Men were allocated to escort duty and left with the hunters. The rest returned to the camp, leaving the two captains and their original five bodyguards by the broken tower.
“You still want to look inside?” Grand asked.
“Of course. Do we have time?”
Grand looked up at the sun. There was still over an hour of good light. “Yes,” he said, “but you might want a torch.”
Serhan made his way to the door and entered. Grand followed. The interior was quite well lit because of the gaps in the walls. It was a single room, about fifty feet across. There was a place where stairs had once gone up to higher levels, but they were broken, and nothing significant remained of the roof. People had died here. There was a scattering of relics on the floor, swords, spear points, arrow heads, mail shirts. All of them rotten with age. Serhan inspected them all carefully, working his way slowly towards a back corner. When he got there he knelt down and gently brushed away what remained of a couple of sets of mail.
“Here. Darius come and look at this.”
Grand walked across the room and looked at the floor. There was a large iron ring set into one of the stones. Serhan tried to move the ring, but it was rusted solid, and didn’t look like it could hold the weight of the stone any more.
“You think there’s something under that?”
“Who knows, but I want to have a look.”
Using their daggers and what purchase they could get on the ring and the stone they managed to lever an edge up high enough to slip one of the rusted swords under it, and then it was just a matter of brute strength to lift one edge of the slab and flip it over. They stood looking down into a black hole.
“How deep do you think it is?” Serhan asked. He was smiling and excited. Grand picked up a stone and dropped it into the darkness. It struck stone almost at once.
“No more than ten feet,” he said.
“I think we need that torch now.”
Grand went outside and talked to the guardsmen who waited there. They were still alert, and he could sense that they were embarrassed at being caught out by mere hunters.
“Fetch me a torch,” he said to one of them.
The man mounted and set off at a gallop down to the camp. Darius looked around him again, at the view down the scarp, where he could see for twenty miles, at the forest, and the ruins. There was something about this spot that he found uncomfortable. This place had been built as well as White Rock itself, perhaps by the same builders. There was no doubt that it had been brought low by the Faer Karan, and easily at that. He wondered at the men who had stood at the walls and in the keep, waiting for death. They must have known that it was hopeless by the time they faced the enemy, so why had they died? Perhaps Serhan was right. Someone important had died here.
The guard came back with a pair of torches, and he took both and returned to the tower. Serhan was sitting on the edge of the hole with his legs hanging into the darkness.
“Good,” he said. “Now I want to go down there alone.”
“Cal, that would not be sensible.”
“Trust me.”
“You say that a lot. I am your friend and ally, and you should trust me more,” Grand reproached him.
“It is n
ot because I do not trust you, Darius. Some of the things that I know are dangerous – even the knowing of them. I want to protect you.”
“That is a poor excuse. That arrow should have killed you, but you knew it would not. How? What do you expect to find down there? I have so many questions.”
Serhan looked at him for a moment, as if weighing his reply.
“Darius, I cannot tell you what saved me from the arrow. Let it be enough that Gerique felt it would be an embarrassment for himself if I were downed by an arrow from a... ” He appeared to search his memory for the right phrase, “half starved brigand with bad teeth.”
“Gerique?” Grand was surprised, even shocked. “He has protected you in some way.”
“The suggestion was made that it would be a betrayal to allow what passed between us to be known. So you do not know.”
“This I understand, but what lies beneath us?”
“I have no idea, but it is possible that it will prove even more dangerous. Please allow me to go first, alone, and see what is there.”
“As you wish.” He lit a torch and handed it to Serhan who dropped down through the hole at once. Grand listened carefully. He heard scuffling, metallic noises, a faint curse, then a long period of silence. It grew so long that he became concerned. Then he heard a voice speaking, very quietly, somewhere below.
“Cal?”
“I am still here.”
“What have you found?”
“It is worse than I feared. As far as you are concerned, nothing. Can you pass down my cloak and a length of rope?”
“In a moment.” He fetched the items and went back to the hole. Serhan stood beneath with the torch. He looked worried, and excited at the same time. Grand dropped the things to him and he went away again. More noises drifted up. After a couple more minutes he appeared in the light again.
“Take this,” he said, and passed up something wrapped in the cloak and well tied with the rope. It was about a foot and a half by a foot in size, and six inches thick. Grand put it to one side, and turned to help Serhan out of the pit. “And this,” Serhan said. “But do not take it out of its sheath.” He passed up a sword. It was not marked at all by age, but the hilt was plain and had a dull satin glow, and it was light, lighter than it should have been.
Serhan came up out of the hole and insisted that they replace the stone. He seemed troubled, scared, pale, but oddly exultant.
“You must have found something very special down there,” Grand ventured.
Serhan seized the front of his jacket. “I found nothing,” he said. “Never mention this; not that we were here, not that I went below.”
“As you wish, Cal. It never occurred.” Grand looked into Serhan’s eyes, and was afraid. He was afraid because he could see that Serhan was afraid, and he had never seen that before; not even when he met the Faer Karan for the first time. As soon as he had seen it the fear was gone, and his friend slapped him on the shoulder.
“So,” he said. “I’m starving, shall we go down and see what they’ve got cooking in the camp?”
13 Samara
Tarlyn san Porwill Saine stood on the wide, west-facing balcony of his substantial home and looked down across the city. As he looked he ground his teeth with anger and frustration. There were fires in Callista again. He had no idea who had set them this time. It could be royalists, or bandits, or the guard. Even a simple crime or arson was a possibility. Whoever was to blame it would mean that more people would be dead, or fleeing the city.
From where he stood he had a sweeping view across Samara. His house was at the top of Morningside, close to the Peaks, and to the south, by the sea, he could see the citadel, which looked quite fine after the attempt to restore it a couple of years ago. It was unfinished, though. The guard from Ocean’s Gate had told them to stop. He’d explained to them at length that they would use it for a fortified warehouse, but that hadn’t changed anything. It was too much of a defensible position for the guard to permit it.
This side of the citadel was the ruin of the Great House, traditional seat of the Kings of Samara, the house of Tarnell. There had been fourteen kings in an unbroken line from the same house, and they had been good kings, by all accounts. Samara had prospered, grown, and become the centre of the world. The streets had been thronged with artists, sculptors and musicians, or so it was said. It was all so long ago. The population was half what it had been before the coming of the Faer Karan, before the end of the kingdom. Houses stood empty, the docks were deserted, and the streets were rutted and pot-holed.
He felt a pricking in his eyes and turned away. It was his city. It had been his father’s before him, and on before that. The trading house of Saine was almost as old as the line of Tarnell, and they had always been rich, powerful, and at the centre of things.
Tarlyn was not a thin man, and he walked with a comfortable rolling gait back into the house to where his breakfast was laid out on the big oak table that failed to dominate the room. He looked around and saw that Crise, his servant, was waiting discreetly in a corner.
“Crise, will you go and find my son and see if he will be kind enough to join me at breakfast?”
“At once, sir.” Crise was gone and he was alone.
On the wall behind the dining table was a painting. It was one of the works that his family had caused to be rescued from the temple. It had housed all things beautiful, by order of the king, and the house of Saine now had basements stuffed with paintings and statues, tapestries and books. It was a fraction of the collection, but it was something. The rest had burned when the temple had been fired.
This painting was something that had been commissioned by royalty, he had no doubt. It showed the king, he did not know which one, obvious in the traditional white robes of Tarnell with a golden crown on his head. He was sitting astride a noble white horse, and one hand rested on the hilt of a sword while the other was raised in acknowledgement of the cheering crowds. He was followed by a platoon of guardsmen on horseback, resplendent in steel, silver, black and white. They looked very fine indeed. Behind them all stood the Great House as it must have looked four hundred years ago. It was a stunningly beautiful building, if the painter was to be believed, all curved buttresses, golden stone, crystal windows in a hundred colours, glowing in the sunlight so that it almost outshone the king, but not quite. Nothing was allowed to outshine the king.
They still had a king, he reminded himself, or at least a man who claimed to be king. Simon Tarnell told anyone who would listen that he was the twenty-seventh monarch of the old line, and there were quite a few who did listen. He looked at the picture again. What would that clean, noble, smiling monarch have thought of the dirty, brutal figure that claimed to be his heir?
He sighed. Nobody would ever know. The old Samara was dead and gone, and the new one, the Samara that his family had fought to hold together for nearly four centuries was disintegrating under his stewardship. It was not his fault. He had held the traders’ guild together, protected the food convoys coming into the city, supplied Ocean’s Gate with enough food to keep them off his back – at great personal expense – and he had tried so hard.
None of his predecessors had been forced to cope with Simon Tarnell, though in truth many of the pretender’s forebears had been little better. The idiot attacked the guard whenever he could, and in response the Ocean’s Gate guard attacked him, and burned houses, and killed. On top of all that there were more bandits every year, and his own personal militia was already struggling to protect his house and the guild’s convoys.
He could have coped with Tarnell, or the bandits, or the guard, but certainly not with all three. Perhaps this was finally the end of Samara. In a few more years it would be a town, then a ruin.
“Daydreaming again, Father?”
Tarlyn turned, and smiled. His son was very dear to him, and a source of some pride and happiness, even in a dying city. The boy was bright, good looking, cheerful, and everything his father wished him to be.
&
nbsp; “Corban, did you sleep well?”
“Like a log. You?”
“Fine. I will need your help today. We’ll be putting together another shipment for the blood suckers at Ocean’s Gate. I want you to look out some things for the guard captain. You seem to know what will please him.”
Corban smiled a sour smile. He was only seventeen, but much older in many ways.
“I know his vices, father, that’s all.”
“Then cater to them.”
They sat at the table and began to eat. Both of them took their meal in a way that suggested food had never been a problem. They picked over what was on the table, looking for the tastiest morsels, not eating most of what was there.
“I had an interesting encounter in a tavern last night,” Corban said.
“I do wish you wouldn’t go there. It’s dangerous.”
“I had Brunt and Tercel with me. They are good men and would have protected me from any harm.”
“Indeed, but they cannot protect you from everything, Corban.”
“Do you want to hear this?”
“Very well, tell your story.”
“There was a man there who said he had recently come from the north. He arrived the day before yesterday, and he was offering his sword out for hire to whoever wanted it.”
“Did you hire him?”
“No, Father. Brunt didn’t like him at all; called him a stringy, yellow backed boot robber.”
Tarlyn laughed. “That’s Brunt.”
“Anyway, it was what he was saying that was interesting. Apparently something is going on at White Rock.”
“What kind of thing?”
“One of their guard captains, perhaps two of them, have started hunting bandits.”
“Great skies above us! Why?”
“I don’t think he knew, but he did say that lives were spared, people sent back to their villages, and some were branded and banished. He himself showed me the burn scar on the back of his hand. Apparently the bandits in White Rock’s domains are almost extinct.”
“White Rock is Gerique. Nothing would be happening if he didn’t know about it. What’s he trying to do?”