by Stephen Hunt
Can this devil be a test, sent by the gods to make me doubt my task? If so, they will fail. I will succeed for Lady Cassandra’s sake. Temmell will give me her healing in return for a handful of stolen pages. Let Kani Yargul be cursed and trampled under Atamva’s hooves. Does my father truly still live? Truly? ‘How long did it take you to cross the ocean and reach the other shore?’
‘Six months crossing by trading ship with stopovers at the Rottnest Isles and Furinn Point. Picking worms out of biscuits with my dagger when I wasn’t so seasick I couldn’t eat ’em anyway. Never much had a liking for the Lancean Ocean. Storms and sea-serpents and pirates. You show me a sailor and I’ll show you a dunce with a sail too stupid to make a living any other way.’
Alexamir’s people called it the Endless Ocean. Six months sailing over the cursed salted wastes. It might as well be endless. And if Alexamir made the journey and survived it, what would he find in the war-torn countries on the other side of the sea? An old warrior who barely remembered his young son? A boy who served the same Krul who had attempted to have Artdan Arinnbold murdered, who had stolen his wife. What if I came to him with the tale of how I slit Kani Yargul’s treacherous throat? What if I came to him bearing the joyous news that his exile was at last over. That he could return home to the clans? But how would Alexamir do that? He was an exceptional thief, not a mighty sorcerer like Temmell. If he managed to slip past the Krul of Krul’s guards and kill the leader, what then? Kani Yargul had united the clans. Promised them fabulous victories over the filthy foreigners who kept the Nijumeti contained inside the steppes as though the grasslands were the riders’ cage. What would Alexamir have to offer hundreds of angry clan elders and warriors who presently stood so high within the horde? Their leader’s untimely death in a now ancient blood feud, repayment for bad dealing over a stolen wife? Alexamir would be earning his own death with Kani Yargul’s blood. But perhaps that is a price worth paying?
‘Sure is odd,’ said Nocks. ‘You being the spit of Artdan. Wide and wagon-heavy for a Rodalian, too. Course, if that old wolf had come raiding down this way and left a bun warming the oven of some village girl, you’d have a blue tint to your skin, wouldn’t you, Norbu?’
Yes, it was as though the unsightly soldier saw straight through Temmell’s enchantment. Alexamir tapped the air-mask hanging around his neck. ‘Nomads never raid the Mask Heights.’
‘True enough,’ leered Nocks. ‘Nijumeti maraud for the sheer devilment of it, and ’tain’t much fun scaling slopes so high you need to keep your hut stocked with air tanks to live there.’
They sailed on for another three days and nights, carried fast by the current. It took until the fourth day for the voyage to turn ugly. Alexamir was leaning against the vessel’s side, watching the crew work around him. Ahead of them another bluff-bowed and widebeamed fishing boat drifted in the stream, her planking carved from red alpine wood, a crew of four casting a net while managing her single white main-sail. A day hadn’t passed without Alexamir passing a dozen similar shallow-drafts plying their trade in the Yarl. Identical craft worked out of every river village. As he looked closer, this boat seemed to be having difficulties. Her crew struggled wildly with their netting; one of the sailors abruptly pulled off his feet and catapulted across the small deck. Out in the currents, the fishing boat suddenly started to spin madly as though she had been captured by a whirlpool.
This unexpected sight hadn’t escaped the attention of a rigger up in the Arrow’s sails; his yells rousing crewmen across the deck, halting them mid-task. ‘Tusoteth! Tusoteth!’
Alexamir grabbed a sailor running past. ‘What is he calling?’ The riverman pushed past Alexamir as though the passenger before him didn’t exist, not bothering to answer, sprinting towards the hold. The look of pure panic on his face spoke volumes, however. Are we to fight the river’s wild, mischievous currents now? It was as though Rodal wished to end Alexamir’s incursion into the mountains before he stole the spirits’ power. First it sends winds to chase me. Now this. Whatever this is. ‘Atamva protect me,’ muttered Alexamir. ‘Show these devilish spirits why you never allow them to trouble the grasslands. Show them why you are the most powerful of all among the gods.’
Nocks appeared on the bow, his eyes blinking as though he had just been roused from a slumber. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Trouble,’ said Alexamir. ‘There is a fishing boat ahead in difficulty on the river. But our crew—’ He indicated the mad flurry of action all around them. ‘They understand well enough whatever woe it is we face.’
‘Ain’t no blow coming,’ said Nocks, raising a finger to test the air. ‘And we’re not running for a wind harbour.’
Sailors emerged from below decks clutching swords, boat hooks and harpoons. And you don’t need steel to fight this land’s wind devils.
‘Damned if there ain’t a dance being thrown and nobody invited me,’ said Nocks. The soldier cast around for the grey-uniformed fighters he travelled with. He found the Weylanders among the press of running crew and startled passengers and barked orders at them. ‘Grab me my rifle and sabre and get your own too. Lively at it!’
‘But the skipper said—’
‘Shan may be a captain, but hell if he’s commissioned in the Army of the Perryfax. These water-rats are as jumpy as spit on a hot skillet and Nocks needs the feel of steel in his fist.’
Out on the Yarl, Alexamir noticed the fishing boat’s rotations slowing. For a moment he thought their panic was to be short-lived, but then he caught sight of exactly what had halted the vessel’s mad spin. Pushing out of the currents came a long grey tentacle, dripping wet and covered with razored suckers. It rose forty feet above the fishing vessel, growing like a mighty tree given sorcerous life from a seed. As quickly as it rose it plunged down, smashing into the fishing boat’s centre and sending an explosion of timber into the air. The flat-bottomed ship split in two, both halves of the vessel caught by the current and dragged into the path of the Arrow. Half her crew spilled into the river and madly swam for shore. These were fast wide waters in the Yarl and it was hard enough for competent swimmers to make it to land at the best of times. These aren’t the best of times. A hill of wet flesh appeared in front of the fishermen, a great barbed beak rising from the water to snap them up. It was as though they had simply been dragged into a cave by a riptide – but this cave happened to be attached to a gut and a fierce appetite. None of the Arrow’s crew made any attempt to appease the creature; to hope that its appetite might be satisfied with the fishing vessel and leave the larger trading cog alone. The thud of crossbow bolts and curved short-bow arrows sounded across the decking, sailors aiming directly into the now sinking bulk of flesh. It absorbed their volley and wore it like hairs across its slimy, slipping mass. The single tentacle spun around in a rude gesture of defiance, whipping into the fishing boat’s retreating remains, snapping what was left of her sail and clearing the remaining fishermen into the water. They vainly attempted to swim towards the hollering sailors on board the Arrow, but the fishermen hadn’t made ten strokes before they vanished from the water, yanked below the surface by the monster. They disappeared with the speed of lead weights dropped into the current. It only took seconds for the last fisherman to pass from sight before the vast tree of flesh started ascending again. It rose on the Arrow’s starboard side. The limb climbed high and curved trembling above the cog, water streaming from its long ridge of barbed suckers. Then, as though there were eyes on the cursed thing, the tentacle heaved down to curl around two sailors on the main deck, standing their ground and firing arrow after arrow into the limb. The knot of flesh closed around the men, lifting them struggling into the air, banging against the mast, waving the half-dead crewmen tauntingly at the remaining sailors and passengers. Atamva preserve me. This thing is a demon, a river demon. It cares nothing for me or the book I travel to steal. It merely means to make us its meal. Rice-eater, rider and Weylander alike.
Alexamir leapt on to a barrel and threw himse
lf on to the broken rigging, using the rope to carry him past the far side of the evil limb. He rode the line’s momentum as a pendulum, and at the end of the swing dropped down on to the tentacle’s wet back, driving his sharp Rodalian dagger deep into the flesh. It felt like the rare rubber Temmell traded for with the Hellenise smugglers, but gushed thick oily blood while Alexamir rode gravity down towards the deck, giving the beast a long scar on the way down to remember well. You think I am afraid of you just because I travel on the water? You think to catch a hero of my ilk trembling like a foal with a fever merely because you attack me on a deep, fast river? You do not know this Nijumeti. It kept hold of the two sailors, this tussle-tooth, despite the wound he had given it, before flipping the sailors sideways and casting them howling overboard into the Yarl to add to its supper. I will have my prize and you will have my dagger and the Golden Fox will have her legs back. The now empty tentacle came switching around in search of Alexamir and he ducked below it, carving out its flesh with a flash of steel. The damn knife is sharp, but too shallow to sever the limb. His hand was soaked in dark oily gore. He might as well have been pulling a calf out of a steer. But it was death he was about this day, not life. Perhaps his. I shall slice you a thousand times and not think it too much. The river will run black with your blood.
Off to the side the skipper and one of his cousins came running towards the vessel’s side, hauling something long, sharp and barbed. They were followed by four Weyland soldiers, grey-coats clutching their rifles close and shooting as they ran, putting bullets into the massive tentacle. It had experienced more than enough of the cog’s inhabitants, this tussle-tooth, and by whatever senses the limb commanded, it curled out contemptuously like a battering ram of wet flesh, knocking over the rice-eaters and Weylanders alike, sending them barrelling across the wet planking. Then it darted back towards Alexamir. He tried to vault over the tentacle, but the monstrous limb shifted angle at the last moment, slamming the wind out of his gut as it closed around him, pulling him off the decking. His dagger tumbled away across the deck, lost from fingers spasming in the bone-crushing pressure of the beast’s embrace. At last Alexamir was glad for the stupid, itching, over-hot clothes he had been made to wear, the fabric of his disguise tearing as the spiny suckers flowed around his body. The tentacle whipped him in an insane circuit around the air, as tight around his waist as being trapped beneath a rockfall. Trying to disorient me before my drowning? And drowned is what Alexamir would be if he fell into the Yarl. He could barely dog-paddle through a stream, let alone survive the wicked torrent below. He looked down dizzily and saw the hill of flesh rising out of the water again, a sharp evil beak opening and closing. On either side of the beak, he faced two beady eyes, far too small for such a river monster staring in loathing at him. They belonged to a bird of prey rather than this boat-cracking leviathan. Alexamir’s arms flailed free and he tried to prise apart the tentacle’s grip with his hand, but his gore-slicked fingers slipped off the greasy limb. He banged on its flesh fit to collapse the edge of a mountain, but the creature merely spun him faster in the air. He spat at Tussle-tooth and showed it his finest scornful grin, but this only served to make the monster begin lowering him towards its chattering maw.
‘Norbu!’
That ugly dog Nocks, running across the Arrow’s deck, below and to Alexamir’s side. He lugged the large spear-like thing previously borne by the cog’s master and crewman. Nocks hurled the black shaft towards Alexamir and the nomad caught it in his right hand. The Weylander was a squat little ball of muscle to have made the throw. Heavy. Too thick for a decent spear. Polished wood with a barbed metal tip, and something else. A fuse spitting flames at the back-end. Alexamir realized what this device was that the captain and his cousin had been manhandling towards the river’s edge. A black-powder harpoon.
‘Sword!’ choked Alexamir, just loud enough for the Weyland soldier to hear in-between the tentacle flailing him about.
Having hurled the harpoon, a sabre was an easy enough weapon for Nocks to pull out of its scabbard and pitch towards ‘Norbu’. His sword arced through the air, the blade’s knotted hilt nearly slipping out of Alexamir’s blood-covered fingers, but he held it fast enough to slide his fist below the curved hilt’s basket. He reached back with his other hand and cast the harpoon down as strong as any lightning bolt tossed by a storm-god, burying barb and sinking the harpoon straight into the monster’s left eye. For a second the tentacle mauling Alexamir froze and left him hanging in the air above the water, its grip easing just enough for him to breathe again.
‘There is your breakfast, Tussle-tooth,’ laughed Alexamir, fixing the remaining baleful eye with his warrior’s grimace. The tentacle curved violently out, obviously aiming to beat Alexamir against the mast and smash him like an egg. ‘And here comes your second serving.’ Alexamir slashed down with the sabre. He was the Prince of Thieves and while he might resemble some pasty-faced rice-eating lout of a goat herder, the blood of the Arinnbolds burned through his veins as his gift. The sharp Weyland cavalry sabre blade struck the tentacle and curved straight through the filthy thick flesh, just as a Nijumeti would decapitate a rival from horseback. What was left of the bleeding stump fell away just as the harpoon exploded. Alexamir didn’t see the black powder harpoon detonate, but he felt the heat of the blast as he tumbled down through the air towards the deck below, followed by a wet rain of flesh coming down across the Arrow. As he struck the planking he rolled into a trained saddle-tumble, and when he came to his feet, he saw the remains of a hill of flesh sinking below the waters. Eat well, fish. Enjoy my gift today and remember well the name of Alexamir Arinnbold.
‘It is very rare to encounter a Tusoteth this far west,’ spat the skipper, his chest heaving and face ruddy from exertion. The cog’s master limped to the vessel’s side and watched the dead beast follow the fishing boat to hell. The side of his face was black as coals from the bruising kiss of the monster’s tentacle. ‘They live in the deep marsh waters of Hellin, but sometimes their young swing upstream and enter the river, growing close to adult size. Always hungry and full of fury, with only fish to feed on rather than cattle and waders.’
‘Ain’t nearly rare enough for me,’ spat Nocks. Alexamir handed the Weylander back his sabre, and the ugly soldier wiped the dark blood off on the torn sail before pushing it back in its scabbard. Incredibly, the two sailors from the Arrow who had been thrown into the water were visible on the northern bank of the Yarl. Wet, bedraggled but alive. They had survived their dunking and the attentions of the creature. You are kind to them, Atamva. But then, those two are crazy enough to make their living upon the water, and you oft protect the insane.
‘The Arrow Jang owes you a debt,’ said Shan to Alexamir and the group of Weylanders. ‘But I will still require you to stow your guns and swords inside my chest for the remainder of the voyage.’
‘We pay in lead and you pay in thanks,’ said Nocks. ‘A soldier can grow mighty poor fighting like that.’
‘Then it is lucky for us all that you fight for the honour of your foreign prince and his parliament.’ He laid a hand on Alexamir’s shoulder. ‘And you are a true scraper, Norbu, as hard and tough and strong as the high mountains which gave you life. You would not have to face such wicked creatures on most of our voyages.’
‘And in the capital, I’ll never face such evils,’ said Alexamir. And if you knew what I truly was, you’d feed me to the next brother of Tussle-tooth to swim across your bow.
The remainder of the voyage passed uneventfully enough, river traffic growing more frequent as their passage along the Yarl carried them through canyons and valleys towards Rodal’s capital. Wind harbours and villages dotted the waterside, many travellers and pilgrims and traders following the roads along both riverbanks. Wagons and caravans. Trains of merchants with ponies and yaks laden with bundles of cargo. Water from the river flowed into irrigation systems, feeding flooded paddy fields and carried off towards the slopes by wooden aqueducts. It seemed a remark
able folly to Alexamir, staying fixed somewhere long enough to grow crops, rather than freely following the steppes’ rich grasses with cattle and clan. The spirits that inhabit Rodal are cruel. They deny the rice-eaters such a bounty. They keep their people pinned to the same ground so they always know where to find victims to torment. Each stop drew Alexamir closer to his prize. Skyguard fighters occasionally skimmed down from their patrols and buzzed the canyons, bored pilots in the Rodalians’ wooden pigeons turning victory rolls for the amusement of the Arrow’s passengers and crew. They would not be so pleased if they knew Temmell has given the clans the magic of their wings. These rice-eaters are due for a rude surprise when the horde rides again.
Two weeks after they had been attacked by the marsh creature, the Arrow came within sight of Hadra-Hareer, twin mountains rising high above the steep red-walled canyons that enveloped the Yarl River on both sides. White-walled buildings clung to the mountains, scarcely visible through a cloud mist clinging to the peaks, and Alexamir watched triangular flying wings swooping into hangar tunnels up there. The crows have built their nest on high. Similar structures to the mountain city’s clung to the canyon walls the Arrow sailed past. Alexamir noted what he saw with a professional raider’s eye. White stone oblongs dotted with uniformly narrow windows, able to be sealed by shutters against attackers and storms with equal ease. Narrow enough to pass rifle barrels and crossbows while keeping out any invader wider than a snake. Seventy feet off the ground, inaccessible to attackers who didn’t carry tall siege ladders or the taste for scaling heights by hand under heavy fire. The buildings clung on to the side of the canyon where the twin mountains towered. On the opposite bank he counted only a few sentry towers rising from the mesa top, the occasional wind harbour and hundreds of narrow entrances into the canyons, some arched like caves, others open gorges with lofty walls but barely wide enough for a laden pony to pass. He shivered at the thought of what it would be like for the horde to assault this dry, hard, grassless place. Trying to gallop through a maze of twisting canyon trails where one shepherd on high with a pile of rocks could make corpses of an entire clan. Then assaulting buildings high on the canyon walls. And what would we find if we broke through? Dark passages leading into their foul tomb of a city. Temmell chose me well for this piece of thievery. Only Alexamir has the courage to enter Hadra-Hareer by guile and the skill to copy the spells the wizard needs.