by Vale Aida
She snapped her fingers at the man at her side, who was trying to make her drink some kind of potion. “They will slow me down,” said Emaris firmly. “I’ll go alone. But thank you.”
Thereafter, he was ready to leave almost at once. The stewards gave him a change of clothes and a bulging satchel of food, as well as his pick of the armoury: a bow and quiver, and a couple of throwing-spears to sling from his saddle. The household’s whispers followed him all the way to the gate. They all thought he was terribly brave. They did not know that he was only doing this because Savonn seemed determined to leave him behind, and Emaris had no choice but to go by force where he was not allowed to follow.
After the ambush, he had ridden almost two days straight in increasing pain. The journey to Kimmet in reverse seemed twice as long, perhaps because he was no longer delirious, and therefore excruciatingly aware of the delay. He passed the banners and cookfires of Lucien’s host the first evening, and was invited by an outrider to travel with the Council’s army, but declined. A lone rider could traverse winding trails that a host of hundreds could not. Otherwise he met no one else on the road, though at least once an hour he thought he heard hoofbeats on the wind and had to dismount to press his ear to the ground.
The pyres were still smoking when he passed them.
It was in the middle of the second night that the crumbling wall of Kimmet rose into view beyond the bare crags and lonely cliffs of Ilsa’s Pass. By then he had dismounted to rest his exhausted stallion, moving his leaden feet as if by clockwork, ignoring the persistent throb of his rib only through brute willpower. He was thinking of the day, nearly four years ago, when Savonn requested him as squire. His tremulous joy had been mingled liberally with horror. “Why me?” he asked. Savonn had, after all, already dismissed a number of other candidates, older and smarter and from eminently wealthier families, and his fastidious tastes were becoming a matter of legend.
“Why you?” Savonn parroted. “Because arbitrary choices are key to establishing oneself as a despotic tyrant, and you, my sunflower, are my arbitrary choice. You do not balk at doing work of a non-decorative nature?”
Emaris bristled. “I have killed twelve men in battle, sir.” The count was a little inflated, but Savonn would never know.
“Dear me,” said Savonn. There was devilry in every smiling line of his face. “I’d thought it was twenty-something. Well, I shall have to make do. You have no objection to following me to the ends of the earth, where—depending on which author you have most recently read—a starless void, a bottomless chasm, or the beginnings of all things await?”
It took some time to parse this. “Follow you?” Emaris asked, imitating the mockingbird inflections syllable for syllable. “I would go there myself, sir, and pull you along in a wagon.”
But there had been no wagon-pulling in all his years as Savonn’s squire; and now, by the looks of it, there would be considerably less following, too.
Lost in thought, Emaris had come within twelve feet of the indistinct figure pacing the road before he saw it: a man in mail, with a longbow in his hand and a quiver on his back, no doubt one of the sentries Daine had posted along the approaches to Kimmet. He raised his voice to hail the fellow. “Go and fetch Daine. I have important news.”
As luck would have mandated, it was Nikas. “Emaris!” he cried. “We thought you were dead!”
Speech abandoned him for a moment. The sight of Nikas—big, broad-shouldered, smiling—filled him with shock, shock that segued seamlessly into a single-minded, exulted rage. Countless men were dead because of him. Savonn was gone, and Hiraen too. And Emaris, having travelled five days almost nonstop, forgot the ache in his head and shoulders, the smoulder of his fractured rib, the blisters where his thighs had been chafed raw against the horse. He had been brought up to despise treachery. Shandei, if she were here, would have struck down this man on the spot. And his father…
Sense returned. He could not outfight Nikas. He had turned down Rozane’s offer of an escort; they were alone with no witnesses. Nikas, assassin-priest that he was, could very well contrive a sudden and permanent disappearance for him, and Daine would never get the news. The work he now had to do did not permit self-indulgence.
“I thought I was dead,” said Emaris. His voice sounded so much like Savonn’s that it startled him, derision slathered with layers of caustic courtesy. “The Marshal ambushed us on the Pass. You must have seen the smoke from the pyres.”
Nikas’s consternation was almost convincing. Savonn would have done better. “We feared something like that might have happened. Where are the others? The Captain?”
“Killed,” said Emaris shortly. “Didn’t you look?”
He watched, unimpressed, as worry transformed into dismay. “Killed? All of them?” When he did not respond, Nikas seemed to remember his question. “We did, of course. Daine sent out search parties for miles around—”
“I didn’t meet any,” said Emaris.
“Didn’t you?” asked Nikas in surprise. “But that was a couple of days ago. The last one got in this morning, and Daine didn’t want to risk any more.” Now, ersatz horror entered the ring. “You haven’t been wandering around the Pass for—what—five days, have you? Where did the horse come from?”
“It was one of the Marshal’s,” said Emaris. The sigils of Medrai were traced all along the stallion’s bridle, but it was too dark for Nikas to make them out, or so he hoped. “I tried to follow them, but I lost the trail.”
“You’re worn out,” said Nikas. He reached for Emaris’s arm. “Come with me. You need something warm to eat, and then a long nap. Give me the horse.”
Emaris’s fingers tightened on the reins. If only he had time to mount, he might just be able to ride Nikas down and escape to the fort. But Nikas had a bow, and was still gripping his wrist. “Come on.”
“I can’t walk any farther,” said Emaris. “Give me a leg up into the saddle.”
Nikas gazed at him. What either of them would have done next, he had no idea, and would never find out. A shout splintered the frosty air, making them both jump. Nikas spun around. A large figure and a small one had appeared at the bend of the road. “Emaris, you bastard!” roared a voice, all too familiar. Vion. “What was the afterlife like?”
Nikas made a grab for the reins, but they slithered through his fingers. Torn between hysteria and relief, Emaris threw himself astride the horse. “Cold and boring,” he called, unslinging one of his throwing-spears. “So I came back. Do you mind yelling a little louder?”
Where making noise was concerned, Lomas never minded. “Wake up!” he bellowed, every word resounding sevenfold from road and crag and barren clifftop. “Sound the horns! Wind the trumpets! Bray the donkeys! The dead arise!”
It was a shout to start avalanches. Nikas’s hand strayed to his bow, but Emaris moved first. He launched his spear in an overhand throw, and at such close range it was only Nikas’s quick reflexes that got him aside in time. Vion added his shout to the din. Two swords—his and Lomas’s—scraped out of their sheaths in unison. No, more than two. The rest of the patrol must be on their way.
“Even for the Empath’s lapdog, these look like lousy odds,” Emaris remarked, hoisting his second spear. In the same breath, Nikas drew his bow. “Are you going to shoot me, or just stand there till your bowstring snaps?”
There was no sign of chagrin in Nikas’s expression. He had not expected to find any. “Brave gazelle,” said Nikas. Lithe-footed, he moved towards the thick underbrush by the side of the road. “Lord Silvertongue would be so proud. Unless, of course, he really is dead.”
Emaris pushed his heels into the flanks of his stallion, spear-tip turning with him. Vion and the others, still shouting, were too far off to be any help if Nikas decided to release his arrow. “You don’t believe me?”
“Don’t take it personally,” said Nikas. He was smiling. “I just happen to have it on good authority that Queen Marguerit wants Savonn alive. He was, after all, her Emp
ath’s favourite plaything. And one of her most useful double agents—why, even more useful than poor little me…”
Emaris hurled his spear. Nikas saw it coming. He stepped aside, and once more it thudded harmlessly away. He had no others. “Go on,” said Emaris. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. He made a mistake there once, Hiraen had said of Savonn. “Tell me more.”
“Ask him yourself,” said Nikas, and flung himself into the underbrush.
Emaris seized his own bow, ripped an arrow from his quiver, and shot. A fern quivered. He nocked and released again. Again. And yet again. There was no sound from the foliage. Nikas had gone.
He was still sitting frozen on his horse, his bowstring taut under his fingers, when Vion reached him. “What was that? Did he try to kill you? He betrayed us, didn’t he?”
Lomas was hot on his heels, still hollering, with the rest of the patrol swarming behind him. It was almost funny. Distantly, Emaris wondered if any of them had overheard what Nikas had said. Perhaps it did not matter. Even if they had, none of them would believe him. From a man like Nikas, words were only misdirection, and could be rinsed off like so much stale sweat.
The trouble was that much the same could be said of Savonn—a fact of which Emaris had long been aware, and usually tried not to examine too closely.
There was no time to worry. When they rescued Savonn, Emaris could confront him face to face, and he would laugh off the allegations and all would be well again. He forced his fingers to unbend, to lower his bow and put it away. Solicitous hands reached for his reins. He had never been so grateful for Lomas’s rock-steady grip.
“Take me to Daine,” he said. “We have to go to Onaressi. The Empath is there. He’s got Savonn.”
23
When Hiraen reached Onaressi, it was the same as he had found it on Midsummer’s eve, with two differences: it was no longer undermanned and culpably led, and the channel under the ringwall had been boarded up with a thin wooden grille, as a deterrent against future invaders. In a situation like this, one could either despair (which was what he longed to do); or get down on his knees in the stream, cursing Anyas for his efficiency, and set about unbarring the way (which was what he did).
The one mercy: steel was hard to come by in the wilderness, so Anyas had had to resort to wood, and the grille was already beginning to rot in the muddy water. Hiraen worked fast with his dagger. He had to be quiet. The ringwall was lit every ten yards with a watchfire, and the white and grey banners that flew from the ramparts were none he had ever seen before. Guards stumped overhead now and then, greeting each other with a mutter. Hiraen had as yet given no thought to how he was going to get past them to wherever the Empath was keeping Savonn, and so far was only trusting to his own instinctive courage, the god-inspired madness of the tragedian who had forgotten his lines.
The grille cost him a quarter of an hour. After that, the channel was as narrow and slimy as he recalled, and a good deal colder. On the far side, his head came up against another grille. By the time he had done away with that one as well, he was frozen stiff from the neck down, and the voices drifting to him from the keep had grown much louder.
He contorted himself like a worm in the channel mouth to keep his bow out of the water. The stomach-rumbling aroma of roasting meat wafted to him from where the soldiers must have been turning something on a spit—a matter of violent irritation, since he had had nothing to eat but a handful of nuts and berries since the ambush. The conversation was in Saraian, and therefore mostly incomprehensible. Still, he understood the subdued quality of the murmuring just fine. He had led men for half his life, and would be dismayed to hear his patrol like this. These were uneasy soldiers, cut off behind enemy lines in inclement weather, and they did not want to be here any more than he did.
He stuck the dagger between his teeth and began to inch, on elbows and knees, out of the freezing stream. After the close rankness of the channel, the fresh air was sweet and dizzying as an opiate. He disentangled his bow from his stiff shoulders and dropped it in a clump of reeds by the stream. His quiver followed. He had half risen from the water on limbs he could not quite feel, dripping copiously, when something scuffed in the grass close by and a shadow flitted across his line of sight. Someone roared, “El kapis!”
Thought was a luxury he could not afford. His body moved of its own accord, as it so often did on the field. He drew a side-splitting breath and splashed back into the stream, water crashing over his head. He glimpsed a scattering of small round pebbles in the mud between his hands, gleaming green with spots of phosphorescence. A shoal of guppies, startled by his movement, flashed past his face. The shadows shifted on the stream-bed as the guard leaned over the channel to see where he had gone. Closer. Closer. Now.
Hiraen sprang back up, slashing blindly with his dagger. Water sluiced down his face and burned in his nose and throat. His blade hit something hard. A man grunted. He withdrew the dagger and stabbed again. This time the blade sank into flesh. The man shouted, and tottered forward into him.
Death was a noisy and protracted affair. He shoved his assailant aside and stumbled out of the stream, snatching up his bow and quiver. Someone shrilled an order from the ringwall. Another guard was sprinting after him. A spear hissed past his head and into the stream, sending up a spray of water. He grabbed an arrow from his quiver, nocked, and loosed without looking at his hands. The second guard fell.
By the sounds of it, three or four others were on their way. So much for stealth. He glanced around the courtyard, came to a rapid decision, and ran for the outbuildings.
There was a disused stable behind the main keep, the roof of which had fallen in years ago. He flung himself into a musty stall to catch his breath, clutching a stitch in his side. He seemed to have roused half the fort. Guards were running back and forth across the yard, shouting, their torches turning the ground into a frenzied theatre of shadow-puppets. Soon they would find the dead men and the broken grilles. Then the Marshal would order a manhunt, and it was only a matter of time before the Empath sniffed him out.
The yelling had grown angry, as if a dispute had broken out among his pursuers. He leaned against the wooden wall of the stall and shut his eyes, trying to catch his breath. Think, Hiraen, think. There was no question of success or failure, of chance and improbability, only how and when. The dungeons were under the easternmost wing, not far from the stable. Savonn might be there. Anyas and his garrison too, if they were still alive. Hiraen would have to slip in somehow and free them, then fight a way back out of the fort. Or perhaps die trying, at twenty-four.
He thought of Emaris, and buried his face in his hands. It would not even be the worst thing he and Savonn had done for each other.
* * *
Isemain Dalissos had a headache, a frequent affliction among those who had dealings with the Empath.
To begin with, his scouting party had returned with a full complement of bad news. “Four hundred cavalry,” said their leader, who was sixteen, terrified, and trying without much success to conceal both facts. They were in the solar that had once belonged to that fool Mordel, with maps strewn over the desk and pinned across the walls. “I swear it, sir. I counted them myself. They set out from Medrai last night, the Safins and the Efrens and the Sydells all together.”
In a predicament less dire, this would have been worth a chuckle. “And the woman? Was she there?”
“No, milord,” said the scout. “But she sent a force with them.”
Isemain paced to the window and back. His left shoulder was still throbbing where that fiend of an archer had speared him at the ambush. Damn the man. “What about the company at Kimmet?”
“No news, sir. Nikas ought to be delaying them.”
“Nikas,” Isemain repeated, not troubling to hide his distaste. He mistrusted men like these, who built their careers on schemes and trickery. The idea that Marguerit was about to acquire another made him ill. “To hell with Nikas. Betronett doesn’t trouble me. They’re nothing w
ithout the Silvertongue and that Safin fellow. What concerns me is the Council’s—”
The door crashed open, chasing the words from the tip of his tongue.
The scout jumped. Isemain’s headache intensified. Without having to turn around, he knew who it was. Only one person in his troop would have dared barge in on him like this. Sure enough, Dervain Teraille was framed in the doorway like a tailor’s mannequin, eyes bright with mockery. He moved aside, and two servants stepped in behind him.
They were carrying a dead man: one of Dervain’s, with a scraggly black arrow in his throat. They laid him out on the floor and retreated again. No one spoke. Isemain stared at the corpse, and then at its harbinger. The air felt heavy and wrong, somehow, as if a storm were coming.
He gestured at the scout without taking his eyes from Dervain. “Out.”
With unseemly haste, the wretch fled. The door shut, stranding him alone with the damnable killer slave. “Let me see,” said Dervain. “A steady bubbling of irritation. Your shoulder must be troubling you. Did the scout bring bad news? And, like Celisse of Astorre, you do not appreciate unsolicited gifts of corpses.”
“Most people don’t,” said Isemain. “Get out of my head.”
Dervain stepped over the unexplained body and sank with obscene grace into a chair by the desk. “I wish I could. People so rarely feel nice things, my lord Marshal.”
A pause, during which Isemain continued to stare him down. Dervain sighed. “Do you require everything to be spelled out for you? My man, your arrow. Did you not hear the shouting?”
Ignoring him, Isemain bent over the dead man. The arrow was, indeed, one of those his bowmen used. “How did this happen?”
“A fight broke out at the stream,” said Dervain. “One man knifed, another shot. Nobody has owned up.”
He leaned forward with his chin propped on interlocked fingers, watching Isemain with unblinking eyes. He was, of course, in an even worse mood than usual because Isemain had had his lover beaten, but this was more than that. He did not look well. On closer inspection, his fine bronze skin was ashen with greyish undertones, his eyes swollen with sleeplessness. Apprehension tingled down Isemain’s back. This boded ill.