by Stephen Hunt
Carter bitterly shook his head. The girl failed to mention her only ransom was to spare Weyland for punishment over the slave revolt. A cost too high. Lady Cassandra’s words didn’t provoke further demands for the prisoners to be burnt at the stake, however. Some of the Nijumeti murmured almost appreciatively. Is she trying to help us, or get us executed faster here?
The Vandian girl shoved Sariel forward and stepped behind Carter, yanking him about roughly by the back of his faded greatcoat. ‘While this one, he is a reckless puppy who follows the old dog around on a tight leash. He kept me locked up in his church’s basement as though I was little better than a thrall, then, worried Weyland’s king might hunt me down and take me for his own, he as good as sold me to the people of the forest. Let both dogs burn for their sins against my person.’
There were more signs of approval from the crowd. A hot-headed thief who dared defy a foreign king, while humbly obeying an elder raider with the wisdom of the ages to impart? Carter suspected the girl was playing a cunning game. Lady Cassandra was singing his praises while making the tune sound like bitter complaints. And no blue-skinned warrior will want to be seen obeying orders from a recently taken saddle-wife of foreign birth.
‘Enough! You all know the way. Even our recently arrived tentguest sees what must be done. Let the intruders be tested and Atamva judge!’ shouted Temmell, clearly eager not to lose the initiative among the wavering nomads.
Sariel was shoved forward to his pyre where the guards attached his manacles to a short chain on the stake’s side. Temmell’s supporters among the mob waved torches in the air and whooped with pleasure. Temmell took a lit torch from a warrior’s hand and presented it towards the crowd, then stepped forward in front of Sariel’s stake. He pressed the torch into the kindling around Sariel’s boots and the straw started to catch light, the crowd swaying and chanting. Temmell laughed victoriously and lifted the torch to the air as though an angel might swoop down and lift it from his fingers.
As the warriors behind Carter drove him forward, he realized with a shock that his manacles no longer cut painfully tight. They’ve been unlocked! Had the Vandian girl freed him, or was this some sleight of hand of Sariel’s? Carter didn’t hesitate. He tore himself away from his two guards and whipped the hanging chain around as a lash, catching the nearest Nijumeti in the face, his boot connecting with the other nomad’s gut. The first rider doubled up, the second tumbled over reeling. Carter rushed the remaining few feet towards Temmell. The clan’s sorcerer swung the torch around to try to fling it into Carter’s face, but as it was the only weapon Temmell possessed, Carter had been expecting the move. Ducking under the burning, tar-wrapped wood, Carter lunged at Temmell. His fingers caught Temmell around the face and he closed them tight against the man’s cheeks, eyes and forehead, intending to at least blind his tormentor if nothing else. Temmell yelled in agony, but it was a torment far beyond a skull being crushed. Sariel’s gift.
Carter’s mind felt as though it had turned to water, gushing out and soaking Temmell with memories and knowledge that did not belong to the young Weylander. So painful. Intensity worse than driving daggers filleting Carter’s mind. There was nothing he could do; he couldn’t control this process. His brain was a dam burst under pressure, crumbling him into pure agony. Both figures struggled together. Nomad guards came sprinting towards Carter to beat him off and slay him. An explosion of light and burning air detonated from a point sparkling between Temmell and Carter, a cannon shell detonating in the air among the mob. Carter recalled a similar explosion in the sky mines, when Sariel had touched Carter, blowing his friends and family across the chamber. The outrush of energy didn’t break the pair’s physical contact though; for this brief moment, Carter and Temmell were a universe being unravelled, folding out and binding them together. This was far worse for Carter than filling Sariel with what had been lost and forgotten. In Vandia, Carter had burned from a fever and the madness of carrying so many dreams and crazy tales, a walking skeleton desperate for a quick end. Passing the load to Sariel had been a mercy, whatever the pain of the transfer. But this. So much raced past. Faces and plagues and lost loves and dead kings and frustrated hopes. Cities and seas and carriers spun from gold, countries that flew through the air and long meadows that stabbed at passing animals with silver acid. It can’t be real. I’m going insane again. Carter wasn’t a key. His mind was a carcass where wasp eggs had been laid to hatch. This was something else again, something far different from his healing of Sariel. It was as if part of Temmell was uncoiling and sliding back into Carter’s mind, secreting itself and hiding. At last the trial was over. Carter found himself on the soil, a pile of vomit which had surely originated from his mouth, empty gut or not. Nijumeti struggled across the ground too, crawling like worms as they tried to recover from concussion.
‘You wanted to witness my sorcery!’ yelled Sariel, as though drunk. The unexpected blast had blown away his pyre’s burning straw. Some of it lay smouldering on the canvas roofs of the nomad tents. If it wasn’t tackled quickly an intense fire would soon sweep the camp. ‘Well, here it is, a spell fit for every blue-blushing jackanapes who doubted Sariel. Eat of it! Drink of it! See how it suits you! I walked with Atamva when the world was fresh and the gods of the Nijumeti danced by the Kappel Sea. And you know it is true, don’t you, Temmell Longgate? Because you swam in the surf with Annayla as happy as any of our kind and heard Atamva name me his brother.’
‘Enough,’ moaned Temmell, getting to his feet while clutching his head. ‘You have cursed me, old man.’
‘No. I have cured you.’
‘They are the same thing,’ wailed Temmell as if he was dying still. ‘I was happy out here. I had a purpose. I had made a place for myself.’
‘You fashioned a prairie-shaped hole to hide in, Temmell. Don’t blame the one carrying the ladder to allow you to climb out.’
‘Who else is there to blame?’
Warriors sprinted around the tents, beating out flames with blankets.
‘Let me re-light their pyre,’ begged one of the nomads. What was left of the crowd of onlookers mingled uncertainly now. Their mood broken by this strange, unexpected conflict between sorcerers.
‘I should let you burn. I should let us all burn.’
‘You were the greatest of us, once. Your powers will return, along with wiser counsel.’
‘You remember me better than I remember myself, Sariel Skelbane.’
‘You are my friend. A friend never forgets.’
‘How much better if you had,’ said Temmell.
The Nijumet warrior showed his indignance in a curl of teeth. ‘What of the burning, what of the trial?’
Temmell stared with something approaching distaste at the young Weylander, reserving loathing for Sariel. ‘They have passed it,’ he growled.
‘This is a disaster I say,’ complained Viscount Wallingbeck.
If Leyla hadn’t just had her sport with the clod between the sheets, her ardour would have been quite spoiled now by the fool’s whining. Leyla tried to fake interest in the aristocrat’s grumbles.
‘I need an heir, not a damned duel with my brother-in-law,’ said Wallingbeck. ‘With a grandchild to bounce on his knee, old man Landor will keep on paying me. You told me the prosecutor would ask for Willow to be committed to an asylum, not dispatch her to dangle from the gallows like some common street thief. If I am seen to have a hand in the deaths of both of Benner Landor’s children, it won’t matter if Willow drops triplets in her birthing bed. The old fool will still cut me off without a penny, don’t you see?’
You forget I gave him a son, too; a brat so I can rule in his name. ‘William, you are a fool,’ said Leyla. She stroked the nape of William’s neck but what she really felt like doing was slapping some backbone into the dissolute aristocrat. ‘You are missing the bigger picture.’
‘Which would be . . . ?’
‘That I’m the one member of the family inside the House of Landor that Willow can’t
force into defending her honour on the field of combat.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t and that’s what makes our arrangement so mutually advantageous. It’s a miracle Duncan is still alive, the amount of times Prince Gyal has dispatched him to the front lines.’
‘Doesn’t Prince Gyal like the Landor lad? Duncan seems a steady enough fellow on the battlefield. Not a damn shirker or coward like some of the fools I’m expected to lead into battle.’
You only front the gallop because you lack the imagination to do otherwise; a cavalryman to the bone. ‘Sadly, someone let slip to Prince Gyal about Duncan and Princess Helrena’s rather unservant-like prior relationship. Gyal is as typically Vandian as he is a male. Very keen on the traditions of the imperial harem, but only for himself as emperor, not for Helrena as empress. Gyal doesn’t have the gumption to assassinate Duncan in case Helrena finds out. But killed on the battlefield? Such deaths happen every day.’
‘But as you say, Duncan is still alive. And now I must face him for grass-before-breakfast.’
Grass-before-breakfast. Yes, the old duelling traditions are still alive in the south. ‘I shall visit Duncan before the duel. Explain to him that I have spoken with you and agreed that this travesty of a trial-by-arms must be won by your house, to ensure Willow doesn’t walk away free. I will arrange for Duncan to drop his guard so that you may stab him through the right shoulder, rendering him unfit to continue.’
‘To first blood in such a public affair? That will not go down well.’
‘Not half so well as when you miss Duncan’s shoulder and run him through the heart!’ laughed Leyla.
‘Then, m’dear, the Landors will have two corpses and I will have unpaid gambling debts and creditors pursuing my carriage through the lanes of Arcadia again. Only I will have the addition of another wailing mouth to feed at the house. Or are you proposing to act as my son’s wet nurse?’ Wallingbeck reached out for her breasts but she slapped his hand away.
‘Don’t be coarse, William. It’s not two corpses I require . . . I need three. My dear husband Benner often makes a habit of snoring in his command tent while his artillery company goes about their business. I do believe he could sleep through a hell-storm, that one. So I shall shove Benner into one and discover the truth of the matter. Or rather Nocks will push him off one of Rodal’s high cliffs. They have so many of them. About time they were used for something other than sheltering insurrectionists.’
‘And then you will be sole heir to the House of Landor,’ said William, a modicum of understanding coming to the dolt at last. ‘But how much money will you pay to support a Landor-born grandchild?’
So, even the stupidest of mules can be led to water. Let’s sweeten the trough. ‘How can I put a value on such a thing, William? Willow’s baby will be an irrelevance. I think it would be unseemly for a lady in my position to remain a widow for too long, don’t you? The war will be over shortly and I will be in need of a new husband to comfort me for the terrible price paid by the House of Landor. How much mightier will the greatest house in the north be after it ties its fortunes directly to one of the oldest and noblest southern lines?’
‘As plans go,’ said the viscount, ‘I like the ring of that one. That sour-faced crimson-hair’s dowry was barely enough to restore the mansion.’
Leyla smiled. Luckily for me, I don’t intend keeping your ancient rundown pile after Nocks has slipped a garrotte around your thick neck. Your title is the penultimate stepping stone in the game of respectability. No, I believe the civil war’s dying gasp might just be the rebels’ revenge assassination of Marcus’ pasty-faced little wife. I’ve tried the king’s bed, and it’s a lot more comfortable than a viscount’s. Far past time my occupancy of it became recognized in law. Briefly, Leyla wondered how long she would be satisfied with merely sitting next to the throne. I dare say it will become deadly dull in time. Well, King Marcus was the most terrible hypochondriac. Wouldn’t it be the most delicious of ironies if he actually did succumb to some nasty little illness? The nation has had enough of kings. Time for a queen, I think.
Temmell shot a morose stare at Carter before he spoke to Sariel. Carter’s eyes drifted back to the sorcerers and away from the scale models of aircraft hanging from the workshop’s ceiling timbers.
‘So,’ said Temmell, ‘how in the name of the myriad stars did this whelp of a young Weylander come to be fashioned as a key?’
‘Lord Carnehan found our staging post inside the great Vandian stratovolcano. The machines recognized he had come into contact with me and trusted that he might do so again. He was passed everything needed to reconstitute us.’
‘If ever there was proof that machines should not be allowed to think,’ said Temmell, ‘here it is. The machines might as well have imprinted a turnip and tossed the root back into the world. I’m surprised its little brain didn’t implode under the pressure of carrying so much.’
‘A little compassion, please. It is these people whom we must preserve.’
Temmell glared at Carter, as though blaming him personally for everything that had happened here. ‘You should have gone insane.’
‘I nearly did,’ said Carter.
‘A deranged turnip,’ muttered Temmell. ‘Yes, yes. I will work on the compassion thing, Sariel Skel-bane. Is it worth asking where the ethreaal who should have come looking for us are, to replace us if necessary?’
Sariel shrugged as though the mere absence was answer enough.
Temmell snorted. ‘I was going to enquire how the struggle is going, but if we are all that is left, I have answered my own question.’
‘I will not lie to you,’ said Sariel, ‘the stealers have spread everywhere. They stand behind the emperor’s throne in Vandia, in Weyland too and no doubt every nation of significance within a million miles of us. They can triangulate the location of an activated gate now. As soon as I close a tunnel the stealers overload the gate to ruination and come haring after me.’
‘Oh joy,’ said Temmell. ‘I do so love walking incognito across Pellas. Well, at least my new Nijumeti skyguard may cut a few centuries off my aimless wanderings.’
‘We do not have that long. Your gift and mine will not be enough. We need to find Eremee.’
‘I’ve died at least three times without my memories since the party was ambushed. How would I know where the hell she is now?’
‘You and Eremee were close,’ said Sariel.
‘If you want me to take you to every beach and mountain-top where we ever shared a sunset together, we might as well allow the stealers to end the world now.’
‘I visited the ambush site,’ said Sariel. ‘I found evidence there which suggested you and Eremee might have stayed alive longer than the rest of the expedition.’
‘I don’t suppose you found a centuries-old message scrawled in blood on a stone telling you where she’s hiding?’
‘Less triteness and more compassion.’
‘By the stars, man, I’ve only recovered for a day. How long did the turnip give you before he started with the pestering?’
‘If there’s anyone who’s been pestered in this arrangement,’ said Carter, ‘I think it’s me.’
‘Take that thought, let it fester for a geological age, then you’ll have an inkling of how I feel,’ said Temmell.
Well, he’s talking to me rather than over me. That’s got to count as progress. ‘What about your patron, Kani Yargul?’ said Carter. ‘He has united the clans using your advice. There’s a horde riding around out here, a horde armed with its own skyguard. You know your history, don’t you, Temmell? You understand what happens every time the Nijumeti unite?’
‘No, you’re not a turnip after all,’ said the younger sorcerer. ‘I quite enjoy a nice bit of mashed turnip with a side-plate of lamb. Do I know my history? I’ve lived it, whelp!’
‘Weyland’s rebels are our allies in this fight,’ said Sariel. ‘As is Rodal.’
‘The stealers back one si
de, we support the other. Are we really fighting another conflict by proxy? This is too tedious for words.’
Carter almost lunged for the arrogant younger sorcerer, but Sariel restrained him. ‘How much more tedious for those who have died to assist us, Temmell Longgate?’
‘Ah, I remember now. Compassion.’
‘The saints rot your compassion,’ said Carter. ‘I have family and friends back in Rodal.’
‘Let them stay there,’ sighed Temmell. ‘Keep the old game in play, Sariel. I shall let Madinsar and her harpies have their way and set the horde galloping north against Persdad. It will be worth changing strategy just to see the old witch’s face as I agree with her plans. Maybe she’ll suffer a heart attack from the shock of it.’
Sariel’s face turned stern. ‘Better if you had never stirred the hornet’s nest in the first place.’
‘And which of us has the greater taste for mischief ?’ said Temmell. ‘Well, I may not know where Eremee is, but I do possess the map coordinates of a soul-sphere that very well might.’
Sariel spluttered in dismay, as close to outrage as ever Carter had seen the old trickster. ‘You sealed off part of yourself ? Of all the prohibitions to break!’
‘Don’t you dare lecture me,’ said Temmell. ‘I’ve gone centuries without once remembering Eremee even existed. I would say I possessed good cause to keep a little of myself out of the Unity and stored safely away. You might be happy to rely on the likes of this—’ he indicated Carter ‘—to keep you from near-senility, but I’d say that in light of current events, my recovery plan has proved less paranoid and more prophetic, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Where did you hide the sphere, you dog?’