Moontide 04 - Ascendant's Rite

by David Hair

  Ramita’s eyes went round as saucers. ‘But they are Zains! They are sworn to peace!’

  Alaron dropped his voice. ‘Shhh. I know. But Yash would do it, for one – we know he wanted to be a mage before he wanted to be a monk.’

  ‘But Huriya and Malevorn have the Scytale – they could make hundreds of magi.’

  ‘That’s true, but don’t forget they’d run the risk of losing control of the Scytale if they did that. I suspect they’ll have the same problem we had: they won’t know how to use it, and there’s no one they can trust to help them decode it. I reckon we’ve still got time to hunt them down before they use it, but we’re going to need help.’

  Ramita stroked Das’ head, then said decisively, ‘Let us do so then.’

  Sweet Heaven above, we’re about to make a deal with Hel’s Whore herself . . .

  Ramita seized his hand. ‘Alaron, I’ve not had the chance . . . Thank you. You gave up the Scytale for my son, and I’ll never forget that, bhaiya, not for as long as I live. You are a true brother to me.’

  He dropped his gaze. ‘No. I failed you.’

  ‘No, bhaiya,’ she told him earnestly, ‘that you most certainly did not!’

  2

  The Emperor’s Great Prize

  The Ambrosia

  The greatest secret of the Empire is the formula for the ambrosia, the potion used to raise the Blessed Three Hundred to the gnosis. It is encrypted into the Scytale of Corineus, which was devised by Baramitius. It is said that the ambrosia will either kill you, or raise you to the ultimate gnostic power, but a third fate exists. Some become Souldrinkers, which is another form of death.

  ORDO COSTRUO COLLEGIATE, PONTUS, 772

  Northern Lakh, on the continent of Antiopia

  Rami (Septinon) 929

  15th month of the Moontide

  The slope below Malevorn Andevarion fell toward a barren plain somewhere north of Teshwallabad, where small herds of cattle wandered seeking water or shade, neither of which were evident to his eye. With Huriya’s Dokken, he’d fled the city after the battle for the Scytale of Corineus – the battle I won, he crowed silently as he moved his left hand to stroke the travel-worn leather satchel containing the artefact, reassuring himself it was still there. His right hand remained firmly on his sword-hilt as he ran his eye over his travelling companions.

  A dozen or more shapeshifters had entered the Mughal Dome, but only he and Huriya had emerged alive to join the six or seven who had been standing guard outside, led by the Lokistani archer-woman Hessaz, now the only other female left. Her hair was barely a stubble, and she was bony with dark, leathery skin. Lokistan was a mountainous land that bred hard, insular people like her. She was freshly widowed, and Malevorn pitied whatever man was stupid enough to go near her next. These few were all who remained of a hundred-strong Dokken shapeshifter pack, and they looked shattered, both physically and mentally.

  Huriya Makani was sitting in their midst: a tiny Keshi girl with the Ascendant-strength gnosis she’d gained by drinking the soul of the Dokken seeress Sabele. She might look like a sexy little bint – even if she was a mudskin – but as he had discovered to his cost, looks could be deceptive. She was the only one of the pack he feared. She was holding an infant, one of the twins of Antonin Meiros and his Lakh peasant wife. Mercer had the other, traded for the Scytale.

  The weak-minded fool! I’d have fought to the death to keep the Scytale.

  It was nightfall, but the temperature remained hot and oppressive, making his costume – he was armed and armoured in the style of a Keshi mercenary – even more uncomfortable. The sun had darkened his visage, and with his new beard and ragged hair he looked the part. But beneath his armour, his skin was pearly-white, unlike the Dokken, who were all darker-skinned, of Vereloni, Sydian or Ahmedhassan descent. Inferior blood – as the fighting at the mughal’s palace proved. They might have strong gnosis, but they’ve got no idea what to do with it. Even Alaron Mercer was too much for them.

  But I’ve got the Scytale now, Mercer, and what have you got?

  It was a pity he’d left Mercer still alive, but he doubted that situation would have lasted: even as he and Huriya were escaping, the mughal’s soldiers had been pouring into the Dome, and with gnosis-use suppressed in there, surely Mercer had been captured. I’ll bet he’s screaming on a rack even now, he thought, grinning at the image.

  He looked calmly about the ring of dirty, dark faces. Hessaz was fingering her bow, and it didn’t need a visionary to see she was longing to use it on him – she hated him, as they all did, although he wasn’t to blame for their predicament; after all, it was Huriya who’d drawn them from their pathetic lives in the wild into the chaos of the hunt for the Scytale. Admittedly, most of the pack had died at the hands of an Inquisition Fist, and Malevorn himself had been responsible for a good number of those deaths. They’d punished him by forcibly turning him into one of them; they still saw him as an enemy.

  I wonder how many of these fools I’ll have to kill before the end?

  ‘Malevorn?’ He looked round as Huriya gave the infant to Hessaz and walked over to him. She put out a hand for the leather case, tense, as if she thought he’d refuse.

  ‘Of course, “Heart of my Heart”,’ he said mockingly.

  Scowling at his reference to the heart-bind spell that linked their lives – if he died, she did too, and vice versa – Huriya pulled the tooled leather case from the satchel, took off the cap and drew out the legendary artefact. It was a cylinder of metal and ivory, inscribed with runes and studded with domes. The top end had four leather straps attached, with eight domes on each, clearly made to attach to the cylinder in certain configurations.

  She turned the Scytale over and over in her hands, her eyes narrowed, her lips moving, and he watched with interest. He wondered belatedly what Sabele – whose memories Huriya now owned – knew of the Scytale, but it couldn’t be much, not judging from the way she was frowning. Reluctantly, she passed it back to him and he peered at the runes himself. He recognised a few, but not many. The tutors at the Arcanum had never talked much of the Scytale, but they’d all agreed that it required specialised knowledge to decipher. He twisted the cylinder’s head thoughtfully, saw the runes change as it swivelled, and began to realise just how little he actually knew.

  ‘What’s happening?’ one of the Dokken males asked. ‘When will you cure us?’

  There it was: the promise that had led them into danger and destruction. Sabele had told the tribe that the Scytale of Corineus could ‘cure’ a Souldrinker, turn them into a normal mage, one who did not have to ingest souls to renew their powers. That was the dream that had led hundreds of them across half the continent and into battle against magi and Inquisitors.

  ‘How does it work, Inquisitor?’ Huriya asked, interrupting his reverie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malevorn confessed.

  ‘What? You told me—’

  ‘I told you that it required special learning. I don’t have that learning.’

  One of the males, a bulky Sydian named Tkwir who favoured a boar’s head when in battle, sprang to his feet. ‘You lying glob of pus! I’ll—!’

  Tkwir stopped and stared at the curved scimitar that had flashed into Malevorn’s hand, the point of which was now resting against his belly. The others erupted with fury, but the threat of the blade kept them in check.

  Hessaz still held the infant, and didn’t appear at all moved by the men’s aggression.

  Malevorn kindled blue fire in his left hand. ‘I don’t know how to use the Scytale,’ he said. ‘There are probably fewer than two dozen people in the world who do. But I know one of them.’

  ‘Who?’ Huriya demanded.

  ‘Adamus Crozier, the man who led the hunt.’

  . . . and sacrificed me, Raine, Dominic and Dranid. I’ll destroy him for that.

  ‘He’ll still be hunting us. Perhaps it’s time he found us: on ground of our own choosing.’

  He watched Huriya consider, whi
le Tkwir and the other men backed away.

  ‘How many men will this Adamus Crozier have?’ Huriya asked.

  ‘A Fist: ten Inquisitors.’ More than enough to deal with your rabble.

  ‘Can he be separated from them?’

  ‘Potentially. We have no chance if we can’t.’

  ‘Our current weakness isn’t permanent,’ Huriya said. ‘We have other kindred, other packs. Can you find him?’

  ‘Yes, provided I can use a relay-stave to contact him.’

  ‘You know we don’t have the skill to make such trinkets.’

  ‘But I do,’ he said pointedly. ‘I need living wood, two feet long, three inches wide, the straighter the better. Are there any trees at all in this Kore-forsaken land?’

  ‘There are forests on the slopes of the Nimtaya Mountains, northeast of here,’ Hessaz replied, ‘tall trees that are always green.’ Her harsh voice took on a wistful tone he’d not heard before. ‘Also in the highlands of my country.’

  ‘We’re not going to rukking Lokistan,’ one of the men grumbled.

  ‘There is a pack of our Brethren in Gatioch, in the forests south of Ullakesh, near the Valley of Tombs,’ said another man, a greasy-haired Vereloni named Toljin. ‘My sister is mated to one. I could lead us there.’

  ‘I know the pack,’ Huriya replied. ‘Or Sabele did. If we go there, how long would it take you to create this relay-stave, Inquisitor?’

  ‘Two weeks? It’s exacting work, you know. But it’s the only way a non-clairvoyant can reach another mage over long distances.’

  ‘And you really can’t decipher this thing yourself?’

  ‘In time, perhaps, but I’d need access to an Arcanum library. Have you got one?’

  Huriya scowled at him. For a pretty face, it could pull a lot of ugly looks. ‘Then we must go to Gatioch. Tomorrow. Tonight we rest.’ She surveyed the men, appearing to come to the same conclusion as Malevorn: that she’d been left with the dregs of the pack.

  ‘What of this child?’ Hessaz asked, holding up Nasatya.

  Malevorn tried to work out what that something was in her voice, then remembered Hessaz had lost a child as well as a husband.

  ‘We keep him,’ Huriya said. ‘Knowing we have him will keep Ramita in her place. And he will have strong gnosis when he grows into it: that will be a valuable bloodline for us.’ She patted the infant’s head uncomfortably. ‘You tend him. I want nothing to do with the whining thing.’ She lost interest and sashayed away.

  Huriya really isn’t the mothering kind, Malevorn noted. But Hessaz didn’t look displeased as she clutched the infant to her and hurried after Huriya.

  Malevorn was left eyeing up the six men, gripping the hilt of his scimitar. ‘Well?’ he challenged. ‘Try me, if you think you’re up to it.’

  ‘Go rukk yourself, Inquisitor,’ Tkwir muttered as they backed away.

  I might as well; there’ll be no other fun to be had amongst this lot.

  *

  They travelled northeast, skirting the immense mountains from which rose the springs that fed the Imuna. They raided the few villages they found for food, striking the thatched mud-brick huts like a hurricane; their gnosis meant they had no fear of pursuit or retribution. In two weeks they reached the highlands south of Ullakesh, the chief city of Gatioch. It was a rugged, arid landscape, where spaden trees clustered in sheltered places between the stark ridges – like hairy armpits, Toljin joked.

  It took another two days for Malevorn to find the perfect tree, one whose trunk was long and straight enough to make a decent relay-stave.

  Certain gnostic actions – ‘spells’, as the layman called them – were enhanced by using a specially created tool, and using Clairvoyance to contact a known person was one such. At the Arcanum, they’d described it as ‘astral harmonics’. Naturally, Malevorn had been the most skilled in his class, even better than his pure-blood friends, and far ahead of Alaron Mercer.

  Thinking of that fool Mercer reminded him of something troubling: at one point in the fight at the vizier’s house in Teshwallabad, Mercer had used Illusion to disable and almost kill three Dokken – but Malevorn knew that Mercer had no affinity as an Illusionist. He shouldn’t have been capable of using the gnosis like that . . .

  Was it really Mercer? Or has he been possessed by something? But possession didn’t work that way, which left the uncomfortable thought that Mercer had somehow changed. He’s had the Scytale for months – surely he couldn’t have used it? But no, Mercer hadn’t been unusually strong during the fight, just competent . . . and with unexpected powers.

  What did it matter? Mercer was probably dead by now, and hopefully his Lakh peasant was too . . . Ramita, Huriya’s once-friend. She’d also been able to use her gnosis under the Mughal Dome. Huriya’s strength was equivalent to an Ascendant, which made Ramita just as strong. Pregnancy manifestation, where a human who bore magi children developed the gnosis, had never been recorded at more than pure-blood level. Another puzzle.

  Perhaps Mercer and his bint did escape – and perhaps they are still hunting us.

  It didn’t worry him overly and he turned his attention back to his relay-stave. While he worked, the surviving Dokken found their own amusements – hunting and sleeping, mostly. Huriya and Hessaz shunned the males, leaving them moody and violent – and stinking; only he and the two women were inclined to wash in the icy streams running from high up the slopes. Neither approached him, and he had no desire to get close to a mudskin woman, even Huriya, who had a certain dusky beauty to her. The heart-bind spell they shared was said to have emotional effects, but none had yet manifested. Unfortunately, the spell was nigh on impossible to negate.

  He buried himself in his task: paring the selected wood into strips, then rebinding them as if creating a recurved bow, only perfectly straight. He sanded it while attuning it with sylvan-gnosis. As a non-Clairvoyant, his call wouldn’t have great range, but his knowledge of Adamus would help.

  It wasn’t until the New Moon rose in Octen, while Toljin and Huriya were away negotiating aid from the local shapechanger pack, that he was finally able to climb to a high point, gripping the stave, and begin his call.

 

  You betrayed Dom and Dranid, you bastard.

 

  And for selling Raine into death, I’ll gut you.

 

  *

  ‘You must kill the Inquisitor,’ Hessaz told her, over and over, but Huriya refused to listen.

  I can’t. Not with that damned binding spell that links us. My heart is his heart: if he dies, I die.

  She couldn’t tell Hessaz that, though. ‘He’s useful,’ she replied, avoiding the Lokistani’s burning eyes.

  The two women had spent much of the last few weeks together, but it wasn’t an easy companionship. Hessaz was a brooding mass of resentments, jilted by the man she desired and disappointed by the mates she’d settled upon instead. But Huriya was discovering there was another side of Hessaz. She’d been raised in unforgiving Lokistan and she was both inured to hardship and committed to family and clan, because you couldn’t survive alone. Those values shaped her loyalty to the Souldrinker pack. She was a soldier in the long war against the magi, and she was willing to give her life to the struggle. And she fussed over Ramita’s baby as if he were her own.

  Hessaz lives for this pack, Huriya reflected, but I can’t see why she gives a damn about these wretches.

  The contrast between the two women couldn’t have been stronger: Hessaz was lean and muscular without an ounce of spare flesh; her skin was dark and hard, her face like leather stretched over bone, framed by close-cropped black hair. Huriya was small and lush and curvaceous, her face soft and pouting, her every movement sensuous. Neither liked the other, nor pretended to, but they were dependent on each other now and both knew it.

  ‘Does the Seeress still speak inside you?’ Hessaz asked.

  Huriya shuddered. The Seeress Sabele
did indeed still linger inside her: they were at war for her body and soul, a war neither was winning. Sabele’s essence had saved her on occasion, giving her wisdom she didn’t have. But her presence frightened Huriya beyond anything else.

  ‘Yes, she’s in me still.’

  Hessaz gripped her hand. ‘Huriya, make peace with her. Let her guide you. We need her, you and I.’

  And lose myself for ever? She snatched her hand away. ‘No, Hessaz, I will not become just another body for her to inhabit. I will not give in! I deserve a life of my own!’

  ‘The moment the Inquisitor solves that artefact, that . . . Sk’thali . . . he will betray us, you know this.’

  Yes, I do know it.

  ‘Embrace Sabele, please Huriya! She always worked for the Brethren – she devoted all her lives to our cause. Yet now when we need her most, she is lost inside your mind.’

  Huriya rose abruptly. ‘No! And don’t ask again!’ she snapped, and stalked away.

  3

  The Return of the Queen

  The Rimoni of Javon

  After the opening of the Leviathan Bridge, many Rimoni, outcasts in their own lands since the fall of the Rimoni Empire and the rise of the Rondian magi, crossed into Antiopia and settled in Javon. Rival Houses were forced to cooperate if they were to survive: Kestria, Nesti, Gorgio, Aranio and others, whose feuds are enshrined in the annals of the Rimoni, buried their rivalries – but they still simmer, even today.

  RENE CARDIEN, ORDO COSTRUO, HEBUSALIM 873

  The Kiskale, near Lybis, Javon, on the continent of Antiopia

  Rami (Septinon) 929

  15th month of the Moontide

  Cera Nesti, Queen-Regent of Javon, wrapped anonymously in a bekira-shroud, waited nervously on the steps of the inner keep of the Kiskale Fortress, watching the plaza filling up with people and wishing the approaching scene was already done so she could take her little brother home. Not that that was likely, not imminently. Beside her, Elena Anborn whispered to her Keshi lover, Kazim Makani. Cera didn’t know Kazim, and her own relationship with Elena was . . . troubled. They had been as close as sisters until Gurvon Gyle had found a way to tear their bonds apart, and she was desperate to find a way to rebuild that trust. She had missed Elena, in so many ways.