by A. J. Smith
Magnus straightened as he felt a presence enter his mind and a female voice spoke clearly. ‘You are wrong, Father Magnus Forkbeard,’ said Ameira, through a means of communication that no one else in the hall could hear. ‘There is indeed an objective, a clear and achievable one.’
Magnus looked past the ranting king and locked eyes with the enchantress. Allowing his mind to relax, he formed a question for her. ‘What is all this for? What do you hope to gain? Your people have no stake in Ranen and Jaa cares nothing for these lands,’ he said, with genuine confusion, finally sick of all the half-whispered games played around the rape of Canarn.
She smiled, though there was no humour as her words formed. ‘Jaa? Is that the limit of your vision? Jaa is an old, decrepit Fire Giant, lamenting the loss of his supremacy. Rowanoco is a dull-witted axe-hurler, and as for the One, he lost touch with this world long ago, his people just haven’t realized it yet.’
Magnus narrowed his eyes as the enchantress decried his god and, more surprisingly, her own. ‘You speak in riddles, witch. Make sense.’
Another smile, and Magnus sensed that Ameira considered him more worthy than many of the men of Ro listening to the ranting of their king. ‘You are a man after my own heart. If things had been different, perhaps we would have been allies. We both dislike these short-sighted men of the One and there might have been a place for you in the Dead God’s empire of pleasure and blood.’
‘You no longer follow the Fire Giant?’ Magnus asked, with cold eyes directed towards the enchantress.
‘And the axe finally falls. I thought you cleverer than this, Father Magnus. The men of the One are ours to control, the men of Jaa are deeply within our design. All that leaves is your pitiful nation of farmers and mindless axe-men. Assist me and I will swear to you that no more Ranen will die than is necessary.’
Magnus turned away and looked at the floor. Around him, knights of the Red cheered and banged their breastplates in loud agreement with their king’s words, words designed by the enchantress to facilitate the invasion and subjugation of Magnus’s people. These men were loyal to their king and the priest couldn’t fault them for that, but they sat unknowingly within the thrall of a witch whose goal was not their own. Close to five thousand knights, clerics and guardsmen were massed on the plains of Canarn, ready to advance into the Grass Sea and the realm of Wraith beyond. Horrock’s men would be no match for this army, and Magnus’s thoughts turned to his brother and the fearsome warriors of Fjorlan.
‘Your plan has a flaw, witch,’ Magnus stated plainly in the dark recesses of his mind. ‘You may have the knights and their king, you may even have the Hounds of Karesia and the people of your homeland, but you will never advance past the Deep Cross and take Fjorlan, not while my brother draws breath and the dragon fleet sails… your empire of blood and pleasure will forever be confined to the south while Rowanoco holds sway in the north.’ It was a small victory, but one that gave Magnus heart for the coming war.
‘Apologies, Lord Magnus, we must appear very foolish to you, not to have considered the dangers posed by Algenon.’ Her words were mocking and Magnus felt a chill travel up his spine as if something beyond his perception was at work. ‘There are many ambitious men in your homeland, men prepared to do much to gain power. Your brother should choose his allies more carefully.’
Magnus felt rage rise within him, but he closed his eyes and suppressed it. He knew that he’d be killed if he were to channel the rage of Rowanoco in the presence of the king, and nothing would be gained by killing a handful of knights before he fell. His mind raced as he searched for the meaning of Ameira’s words. The Seven Sisters had clearly planned this invasion long before Canarn had been assaulted – the witch’s confidence in her status in Karesia and Tor Funweir was testament to that – but he did not know how she could have neutralized Algenon. If the dragon fleet had launched it would be only a matter of days before it reached Ro Canarn and the king and his knights were up to their necks in blood. If the men of Ro left to invade the Grass Sea, they’d leave their rear exposed to the battle-brothers of Fjorlan and the possibility that the fleet could turn round and sack Ro Tiris would quickly halt their advance. Magnus had seen the barracks of Tiris and knew that few knights would remain there. If his brother found Ro Canarn empty and an army advancing north, he would blockade the capital of Tor Funweir and bombard the city until the king retreated south. It was the stalemate that had existed for centuries: the Ro were better on land and the Ranen were better at sea. If the dragon fleet were removed from the equation, however, the Freelands would be vulnerable in the extreme.
‘I can keep you alive for as long as I will it, Father Magnus. Your fate is tied to my whim. How does that make you feel?’ The question Ameira asked was accompanied by a look of pleasure in her eyes which no one but Magnus saw, and it made him even angrier.
‘You have nothing over me, witch. All you can do is kill me and I am not afraid of that,’ Magnus replied with sincerity.
Ameira’s eyes disturbed Magnus. She was attempting to reach into his mind and, although he felt strong, he knew she was powerful enough to influence him – but it would take time that she didn’t have. His will was greater than that of these weak men of Ro, and the voice of his god flowed through him, strengthening his resolve against the enchantment.
He smiled wickedly at the enchantress and his thoughts were violent. ‘Try it. Rowanoco dares you, bitch. You can’t hide behind these knights forever and I will find a way to kill you.’
‘No, Father Magnus, you will not. I am untouchable by your hand and, if you will not assist me, you will rot in a cell.’
Magnus’s thoughts turned to Rham Jas Rami, the Kirin assassin he’d not seen for over a year, the one man, he was assured by Al-Hasim, that could kill the enchantresses. Where the Kirin was now, Magnus didn’t know, but as long as he existed somewhere in the lands of men, the Seven Sisters would be vulnerable.
He heard a laugh in the deep recesses of his mind and Ameira spoke again. ‘Your Kirin friend is now powerless to injure us, his son saw to that when we bought him from a Karesian slaver. The Dead God gives us fresh power to resist his feeble attempts to kill us.’
Magnus knew that Rham Jas had once had children, but they were thought lost following the assault on the Kirin’s village, somewhere in Oslan. To hear that the Seven Sisters had found his son would no doubt make Rham Jas happy and ferocious in equal measure.
‘Maybe you should be more worried about his bow than my hammer.’ Magnus projected his thought with a thin smile. ‘He’s a cunning bastard, witch, more than a match for you.’
‘That may once have been true, but no longer. Let him draw his bow and you will see him as powerless as any in our presence.’
Magnus retained his smile, which appeared to infuriate the enchantress. The Ranen priest knew Rham Jas well enough to know that he was not a man whose actions were easy to predict; Magnus had, more than once, heard someone say he wasn’t worried about the Kirin, only to be found with an arrow in his head shortly afterwards.
‘Maybe this will silence you,’ she said, reaching behind her chair and slowly producing Skeld, Magnus’s war-hammer. ‘I planned to give it to Knight Commander Rillion but, after your ill-advised insults, I may give it to Sir Hallam Pevain.’
Magnus stopped smiling and the thought of such a dishonourable man wielding Skeld caused him to breathe deeply in order to stop himself channelling the battle rage of Rowanoco and getting himself killed.
He gritted his teeth and projected his answer as calmly as he could manage. ‘Give it to whomever you wish, but I assure you they will die at my hand before I take it back.’
Ameira the Lady of Spiders did not look impressed at the threat and, turning to look at the still ranting king of Tor Funweir and the cheering crowd of churchmen, she said, ‘I will be sure to make your countrymen bleed, just so you may watch.’
* * *
Ameira left soon after the king had stopped speaking, and Magnus
was then forced to endure hours of Ro back-slapping, knighthoods given out, bound men promoted to sergeant and promises of positions in the new duchy of Canarn.
Knight Commander Mortimer Rillion was named marshal of the city, with Nathan of Du Ban as his second in command. The king declared that his cousin, Jeremiah Tiris, would be named duke and Mobius would appoint a suitable Purple cleric to oversee the city’s spiritual well-being. Animustus of Voy, the fat Gold cleric, would be returning to Ro Arnon with all of his plundered coin, and Pevain would receive another meaningless title to add to his list of accolades. The mercenary knight was also presented with Skeld as a mark of his valuable service to Tor Funweir – a gift that Magnus knew would see him killed more surely than his existing dishonour.
The majority of the knights of the Red would be travelling north with King Sebastian Tiris, Knight Commander Tristram and Cardinal Mobius, leaving Rillion with fifty knights and a hundred bound men as an occupying force in Ro Canarn. Pevain and his bastards were to be paid for a further month’s work, apparently to assist Rillion in keeping order in the city, but Magnus knew that they would stay because the city had not yet been bled completely dry. Rillion’s command would be a paltry three hundred and fifty men, and Magnus was amazed that no one seemed to regard the danger that the dragon fleet would pose to so few defenders.
Magnus was not so arrogant as to think Rillion, Mobius or the king stupid, so he imagined they must be privy to some information thus far hidden from the priest of Rowanoco.
Strangely, Ameira, the enchantress, was also to remain in Ro Canarn, and not to accompany the king into the Grass Sea. Magnus thought that Rowanoco’s old decree that no witch would ever set foot in the Freelands of Ranen might still hold some sway and perhaps the Seven Sisters were not as free and untouchable as they might think.
As he was led back to his cell, Magnus thought of his brother once again and said quietly to himself, ‘Please be wary, brother, these men have no honour and something is at work here beyond what I can see.’
CHAPTER 4
HALLA SUMMER WOLF ABOARD THE DRAGON FLEET
All Ranen children grew up hearing tales of monsters. Halla remembered having badgered her mother for a story each night before she would agree to go to bed, and her mother had always been willing to sit at her bedside and tell her tales of fearsome creatures and the Ranen heroes who had vanquished them.
The priests of the Order of the Hammer maintained the tradition that the children of Ranen should never forget that they were not alone in the world and that men did not hold dominion over the land, nor had they even held their portion of it for long. Halla remembered tales of trolls, the Ice Men of Rowanoco, who wandered the Low Kast, feeding on rocks, trees and unwary travellers. She loved the stories of the great Gorlan spiders that appeared out of nowhere during the summer months and built trapdoors from which to hunt across the lands of Hammerfall and the Deep Cross. She remembered huddling under her blanket as her mother told her of the scarred cannibal tribes of Jekka far to the east, beings not entirely human which struck at settlements and ate the inhabitants. Her mother’s favourite stories were of the risen men, timid beings who lived in the deepest forests, had claimed the land for longer than men, and were hunted almost to extinction by the clerics of Ro.
She loved hearing fabulous stories, but of all those she remembered it was the ones her father had told her that stayed the clearest in her mind. Aleph Summer Wolf, the now deceased thain of Tiergarten, would wait until his wife was asleep to tell his daughter about Ithqas and Aqas, the blind, mindless Krakens of the Fjorlan Sea. Halla’s mother did not approve of such stories, for the Krakens were more than simple monsters. The young axe-maiden loved the tales, however, and she would often pretend to be asleep in the hope that her mother would leave and that Aleph would take over the storytelling.
The Krakens were supposedly old gods, Giants worshipped by creatures lost in the mists of Deep Time. They were cast down by Rowanoco and made to gnaw on fish and rock in the deepest trenches of the ocean, their minds broken by the Ice Giant’s wrath. Often Ranen sailors would return from their voyages with terrifying stories of encounters at sea, broken masts, ruptured hulls and lost men. Sometimes these were attributed to the Krakens and sometimes not, but Halla was fond of playing on the docks in the hope of seeing a returning ship and hearing a story about the Krakens.
The most infamous tale had come from a winter voyage when Halla was only seven years old. Five ships had left Tiergarten, bound for the mountainous islands of Samnia, but only one had returned, a wooden shell with a crew huddled below decks, half mad from the sight of the Krakens. None of the survivors could put into words what they had seen and they all died shortly after they returned, their bodies having simply given up on life and wasted away, while their minds could summon only shouted warnings of tentacles and death. No one knew exactly what had happened, but their ravings had been recorded by a priest and entered into the written record of Tiergarten as a warning for sailors. The ancient horn of the deep, a twisted brass instrument hanging outside a tidal cave on the coast of Samnia, was said to summon the beasts, and from ancient days the horn had been guarded at all times as a hereditary task by the Order of the Hammer. Only once had it been blown, by a mad axe-master of Hammerfall during the Ro occupation, and he’d had to kill two priests to get to it. The Krakens, when awoken, had provided the Ranen with little in the way of help against the Ro, for they had simply eaten the axe-master and sunk his ship before returning to the deep.
Halla stood against the railings of her father’s ship and looked out across the slowly rolling seas of Fjorlan. It was now her ship and, although she was proud to be on board, it still felt strange. She’d fought all her life to be regarded as equal to men, but now that she was part of the battle fleet she could only think of the old stories of monsters.
The fleet had assembled quickly in Fredericksand, Algenon Teardrop calling his lords to come swiftly and with as many men as could be spared. They’d set sail a little over a week before and were now approaching the straits of Samnia; beyond, the seas of Canarn and Tiris marked the northern border of Tor Funweir.
Her ship, called the Sea Wolf, was towards the rear of the dragon fleet. She knew that if Aleph were still alive, the warriors of Tiergarten would have been closer to the vanguard, but with no thain to represent them they’d been pushed into a less glorious position. She had three hundred and twenty-five warriors spread across three ships and they formed the rearguard of the fleet, not generally considered a position to be coveted. Borrin Iron Beard, axe-master of Tiergarten, was acting as captain and had given the sailors to understand that a single derogatory word directed towards Halla would result in summary death by drowning. He was a good man, pledged to serve the family of Summer Wolf, and he’d known the axe-maiden all her life.
Far to the front she could see the banner of Teardrop, a black flag displaying a weeping dragon. The fog had not yet fully encompassed the fleet and Algenon’s ship, the Hammer of Fjorlan, was just about visible in the distance. She knew that Wulfrick, Algenon’s axe-master, had tried to speak for her and secure a more prestigious position for the battle-brothers of Tiergarten, but Rulag Ursa and the men of Jarvik had bullied the high thain into assigning her to the rearguard. The warlord of Jarvik had taken great offence at an axe-maiden being treated as heir to a thain, but, with no brothers, Halla had no choice but to speak for her people. Tiergarten was the second city of Fjorlan and she was not going to allow her father’s death to affect the honour of his lands. The realm of Summer Wolf was the bread-basket of Fjorlan, the only place north of the Deep Cross where crops could be grown. The soil was dark and rich and, when the snows thawed, the forests and fields provided food for much of the north lands of Ranen. There were also few trolls, which meant that settlements would rarely just disappear overnight as sometimes happened in the Low Kast.
The fog began to grow thicker and Halla could hear bells rung throughout the fleet to alert the helmsmen to eac
h ship’s location. Behind her, dark, hard faces looked up from their oars and slowed their rowing. When the fog grew thick around Samnia, the danger of hitting a semi-submerged rock was ever present.
Borrin Iron Beard stood at the aft of the ship, looking out to sea. He slowly began to make his way past the oarsmen to the forward platform where Halla stood.
‘Easy, lads,’ he said as he walked past the front row of oarsmen. ‘I’ve seen fog thicker than this. This is barely a wisp of cloud.’
He was lying, but Halla appreciated his attempt to calm the crew. She was not yet comfortable with the shouting and bullying that was required of a ship’s captain and was glad of her axe-master’s assistance.
‘You look almost as grim as those dirty bastards,’ Borrin said as he came to a halt next to Halla, joining her in looking forward, beyond the ship’s rampant wolf figurehead.
‘I’ll be less grim when we clear Samnia and can see where we’re going,’ Halla replied, rubbing under her eyepatch.
‘Just hope we don’t get eaten by Krakens,’ he said with an ironic grin, causing Halla to look displeased.
‘It’s ill-advised to joke about Giants, Borrin.’ The comment was meant kindly, but the axe-maiden could not shake off her nervousness about travelling through the Kraken waters. It was a childish fear, and she knew it, but she’d never fully reconciled the reality of Ithqas and Aqas with the stories she’d been told as a child.
The fog bells continued to sound up ahead and Halla thought the vanguard of the fleet must have reached the islands. Her three dragon ships were close together, kept within visual range by their helmsmen.
‘I hope Ursa can sail as well as he shouts,’ Borrin said of the lord of Jarvik far to the front of the fleet. ‘Algenon’s men can negotiate these waters, but with Rulag and his idiot son to take care of, it’ll be a squeeze to get us all through the Kraken waters to Kalall’s Deep.’