by Glenda Larke
Come off it, Arrant. It’s hot enough today to curl hen feathers!
That was because I’m scared pissless, you idiot.
‘Yes, I’m afraid he does. I can feel him too. That’s Favonius Kyranon.’
The intensity of her regret caught him unawares and he stared at her, surprised.
She didn’t seem to notice. ‘I’m almost tempted to forget about Bator Korbus and lead my men down on him instead, right now, and wipe him and his wretched Jackals off the face of the earth.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Almost, but not quite. I have a larger prey; Favonius must wait for Berg. With a little luck, the Quyriots will do it for me.’
Her sorrow-relief brushed by his mind before she closed it off to his senses. Then she turned him to face her, saying, ‘Arrant, there’s not a single other Magoroth except Temellin who could have told me what was out there the way you just did. Those Jackals are still two days’ ride away, too far for ordinary far-sensing, yet you felt them. You can do things most Magoroth can only do when their powers are enhanced by a sword, and sometimes not even then.’
‘But I—I can’t usually.’ His misery bubbled up; he had to be honest with her. ‘I can’t usually do anything much: at least, not right. Today was the first time everything has gone just the way it should for ages.’
She considered him thoughtfully. ‘You know what I think? I think you’re just too young to control all the power you have. You have more than most—Foran just suggested that, too—and it’s too much for someone your age. When you’re older, you’ll be able to bend it to your bidding whichever way and whenever you like. You just have to be patient.’
One part of him knew she wanted to believe that, rather than Foran’s interpretation. He hoped she was right, but in the centre of his chest there was only a sliding, sinking feeling that made him want to be sick.
Tarran, it can’t happen, can it? The way Foran said? That I’ll end up killing people?
Tarran didn’t reply, although Arrant could feel his discomfort as he grappled with the question.
‘And,’ Ligea added, ‘no more imaginary playmates, eh, Arrant? You have to be grown-up now.’
‘He’s not imaginary! He’s alive, even though he doesn’t have a body—’
‘Please, Arrant, don’t be silly. I’m surprised at you, believing in such things still. You are quite old enough to sort out what’s real from what you’ve been making up.’ She waved a hand at the defile below. ‘We are on the verge of battle, and if you are going to come with me, you have to leave your childhood behind.’
It’s all right, Tarran said cheerfully. She doesn’t have to know about me.
He hid a sigh, and nodded. ‘All right,’ he mumbled.
They stood side by side, looking out over that rock-rough landscape, drawn together in companionship by their shared perceptions, by the oppressiveness of what they both felt: an army on the march. And then the moment splintered. People came for orders, there were things to be done, and she had no more time to share with him.
She could be right, said Tarran after she’d gone. We Mirage Makers know you have the kind of power we’ve never felt before.
‘Yeah. And maybe next time I try to use it I’ll end up like a wood-possum on a spit when the fire’s too high,’ he said morosely. ‘“Look, that once was Arrant; now he’s a hunk of charcoal.”’
Tarran didn’t reply, but Arrant felt his comfort anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Damn the rain. Damn the blasted godforsaken bloody mountain weather.
He had the best horse Brotherhood money could buy, and still the beast was slipping and sliding in the loose scree. He peered through the driving rain at the man on the horse ahead of him. Jorbrus. The drunken sot had better know where he was leading them or he, Favonius, would skin the foul-mouthed helot alive. Why the Vortex wasn’t he slipping and sliding all over the place? How did that ridiculous mountain pony with its short legs and unkempt hair manage to keep plodding upwards as if it were strolling across a meadow in the sodding sunshine?
He glanced behind. He could just make out the first twenty or so Jackals, heads down against the rain, mounts stumbling.
He sighed and turned to yell at the guide. ‘Hey, Jorbrus!’
The man ahead reined in and waited for him to draw alongside. ‘It’ll be getting dark soon. Is there no shelter around here anywhere?’
‘There’s a ruined village just around the next bend,’ the man said. ‘No roofs on them houses no more, but’s better than naught.’
‘Good. We’ll stop there.’ That must be the village they’d destroyed last time they came this way. They’d reduced the place to ashes, they’d tortured and killed, yet he had not found the rumoured Stronghold.
He could hear the screaming still…
He hadn’t tortured the children himself; he’d left that up to Crassus, one of his foot soldiers who loved nothing better than carving up living bodies. But there had been a time when he wouldn’t have allowed such a thing under his command. Back when he was a Stalwart. He took no pleasure from hearing children shriek or seeing their parents beg or watching his men rape anyone they chose. But now such things were necessary and he’d do it again if he had to.
Damn you, Ligea, this is your fault. You made me what I am today. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still have my honour. I’d still be a Stalwart, and we’d still be the best damn legion in the Exaltarchy.
Ah, yes. There was the stream where he’d stopped on his way out of the village to wash up. He’d plunged his arms into the iced water and watched the red blood of children swirl away…
Merciful Melete, what have I become?
Bitterness swelled and swamped him. The remnants of the Stalwarts, battle-hardened assault troops, had ended up as Jackals on the outside of the walls of Getria, in the mud of a besieging army. Degrading, humiliating work for dregs, not for proud men. He hated it. He hated her, loathed her with growing rage. You did this to me, Ligea Gayed. You took everything from me.
She’d brought his legion down, sullied their name until Stalwart was synonymous with the Mirage Muck-up, as the whole foray across the Alps had come to be known in soldiers’ parlance. As if that hadn’t been wound enough, she had routed the besieging troops outside Getria with her godless magic and sent them scattering. The others had returned to Tyr, their banners drooping in the dust. But not the Jackals. They had set off on her trail, and this time she would be the one to suffer.
He dreamed of the day he would cut out her gemstone and watch her die. Rathrox Ligatan had said it was a slow and painful death for one of the Magor, and the Magister should know.
Gods, how he wanted to see her writhe. How he wanted to see her beg…
They reached the village and stopped for the night. They made camp, cooked and then settled down to sleep. Jorbrus refused to bed down in among the ruins and disappeared to sleep elsewhere. ‘Ghosts,’ he said. His face was impassive, bovine even. Yet there was something in his eyes that spoke of horrors no sane man would want to pursue. ‘Too many people died here,’ he added.
Typical bloody lowborn peasant, Favonius thought. What do a few shades of the dead matter anyhow? They can’t hurt you…
And yet he couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t the shades that kept him awake, if indeed there were any, but his desire to get to Ligea. She was up there somewhere, or so Jorbrus said. The man had sold her for a handful of coins. His eyes had glinted with greed and his voice was sly with glee as he’d regaled Favonius and his centurions with all he knew about the Stronghold. He’d been reluctant to volunteer to lead the legion there, but a few coins had persuaded him. He had been less helpful with regard to Ligea’s abilities. ‘I dunno much about how it works,’ he’d said. ‘The likes of me doesn’t get to meet the Domina too often.’
Poetic justice, Ligea, for you to be brought down by a traitor to your cause. For that’s exactly what you are, a traitor to our whole way of life. You were Tyranian, damn it!
He knew how dange
rous she was. In the Mirage, he’d seen her make a whirlwind burn. Still, she had limitations. The use of magic tired her out, he’d seen that too. He just hadn’t understood at the time what he’d been seeing.
‘Will she sense our approach?’ he’d asked Jorbrus.
‘Not if you sneak up quiet, no. No sentries there neither, until you get to the walls.’
‘I’ve heard her kind can feel things from afar.’
‘From the next room, maybe,’ Jorbrus had said scornfully. ‘Legate, she’s just a woman with a special sword. She can do funny things with a wind, that’s true. Anything else, she has to be real close. The rest is exaggerated. Even that invisible wall she can build around herself—it takes an age for her to construct it and it don’t last long, neither. You can bring her down with a rip-disc, easy.’
‘And how do we get a chance to do that?’
‘She comes out on the training ground every day. And there’s a cliff above. An easy climb. Hide a few of your men up there with a whirlsling or two and she’s yours. Easy as cracking an egg. And her men—they’ll surrender the moment they lose her. By Ocrastes’ balls, they were only slaves!’
Favonius liked the sound of that. But a quick death? That was too easy. He wanted her to recognise him; to know he was the instrument of her defeat.
He smiled to himself, ignoring the discomfort of too thin a sleeping pallet. The numina at the Shimmer Festival had died because Gayed and Bator Korbus had taken them by surprise, caught them without their swords as a result of treachery, killed them quickly before they had time to raise their magic walls, or so Rathrox had told him. He’d do the same…but he wouldn’t kill her. If they used pebbles instead of ripdiscs, they could knock her unconscious. Then he could chop off her hand or dig out her gem.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he marvelled at the ease with which he could speak of her death, the pleasure he felt at the anticipation of actually seeing her dead. And to think he had loved the bitch once. Gods of Elysium, how could he have been so blind?
When they arrived at the Stronghold late the next day, the training ground was bare, the buildings open and empty, the whole place deserted. When Favonius turned around to demand an explanation of Jorbrus, the man had slipped way into the gathering gloom of evening and was nowhere to be found. Favonius frowned, worry seeping, unwanted, into the chinks of his mind. It couldn’t be a trap, could it? Uneasily he remembered the two men he’d left behind in Prianus after they destroyed the village. No one had ever seen them again.
‘Search the buildings!’ he barked. ‘And find that bloody guide!’
They couldn’t find Jorbrus, but they did find plenty of signs left by the exodus of men and horses. The following morning they tried to follow the tracks, thinking the rebels would be easy enough to overtake. Instead, they found the route blocked by a landslide and the cliff sides seeded with archers snapping off arrows into the Tyranian columns from hidden crevices.
The Jackals were forced into retreat. On the second day of their descent, they found the route blocked once more, by another landslip that had dammed the stream to flood the defile. They were trapped, at the mercy of a handful of men who knew the gorges and the tracks, who knew of a hundred caves to hide in and a thousand places that offered shelter for an ambush. Men who were far too wily to offer battle but who were deadly with a bow. Warriors loosing arrows down from hidden places at exposed legionnaires who had to send their arrows upwards…
A whisper went around the Jackals, fuelled by the glimpses they had of their elusive enemy—of their short stature, their strange garments sewn with beads, their bearskin cloaks and the jewels they wore. They are numina adorned with the gems of Hades, shades of the underworld who can seize the souls of their enemies…
It took Favonius over two weeks to lead his men to safety and, in spite of the protection offered by their armour and their curved shields, many did not make it.
His hatred for Ligea festered. He didn’t care if it took the rest of his life, he would bring her down. Killing her meant nothing; death, after all, was only oblivion, or Acheron’s mists at worst. Favonius meant to make her hurt while she still lived. He would find out what she most loved, and he would destroy that. If it was the child they had heard about, then it would be the child he would torture and kill.
He would take everything from her that made life worth living. He would bring her to despair and make her live out her days in misery.
Next time, bitch, I will not fail.
PART FOUR
THE BATTLE FOR TYR
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Arrant’s head swivelled around with unexpected suddenness. He jumped like a frightened rabbit and banged his elbow on a towpath bollard. Fortunately no one seemed to notice. Foran, Narjemah, Ligea—plus half the population of the city of Getria—were intent on watching the activity along the river.
What’s happening? Tarran asked, swinging Arrant’s head back the other way. Who are all those people? Where are they going? Where are we?
Arrant stifled a sigh and rubbed his elbow. Having a brother who appeared without warning, and then took over your body without asking first—it made him jump out of his skin, every time. ‘We’re still in Getria,’ he whispered. They had been there several weeks, preparing for the campaign and waiting for better weather. ‘Those are Gevenan’s soldiers and they are about to leave for Tyr now.’
Gevenan, a scowl on his face, was watching his horse being loaded onto one of the barges tied up to the towpath. In both directions along the river, soldiers were boarding other barges, lugging their armour, weapons and packs.
Mirageless soul, there’s hundreds of them!
‘Two thousand. And leave my head alone, you brainless idiot! I wish you’d never learned to do that. You’ll have everyone thinking I’ve lost my wits.’
All right, but would you mind looking the other way, then? That’s better. And I don’t understand. Your mother is sending soldiers down the river to Tyr to fight a war? I don’t have anything in my memory that matches that. Soldiers don’t fight wars from river barges.
‘They’re not going to fight from barges! Gev is posing as a tribune bringing in a whole lot of new recruits for the legions in Tyr from a city called Nitida. It’s on another branch of the river and it’s still in the Exaltarch’s hands.’
Isn’t the river all wobbly, meandering all over the place? I remember seeing a map of the Tyr river basin, oh, several hundred years ago, and it looked like bits of curly wool.
‘It is. It will take ages. That’s why Gev looks like a thundercloud. He’ll be bored out of his mind. But we aren’t going straight, either. We’ll have horses, but we will head south and east, and travel the foothills where there are no towns, until we hit the coast. Then we travel west through the other hills where the aqueducts begin. We want to arrive in Tyr on the same day as Gev.’
Why don’t they just ride, too?
‘Well, for a start, not everyone can ride a horse. And we don’t have enough horses. Besides, Ligea says there will be too many other soldiers on the roads, all bound for Tyr. All pretending to be someone else.’
That should have been reassuring, but to Arrant the scale of it was scary. Besides the men on the barges and another thousand going to Tyr under Ligea’s command, there were five thousand heading for the city in small bands from all over the country. Still others were to seize the coastal and central paveways.
He tried to explain that to Tarran. ‘She doesn’t want the Exaltarch to know there is an army on the march. So most people are travelling in little groups, disguised as something else. Like some of the Quyriots—they’re driving our horses, disguised as traders on their way to Tyr markets.’
‘Did you say something?’ Narjemah asked, overhearing him.
He jumped again. ‘Um, oh, just that…there are such a lot of them. Gev’s men.’
‘What happened in Prianus is nothing to what will happen in Tyr,’ she said. She sounded grief-stricken. ‘I remember war
. When I was a proper Theura, I fought in one. Your mother has set in motion a whirlwind she may not be able to stop.’ She gave Arrant a hard look. ‘You stay here with me, lad. War is no place for children. You’ve already seen things no child should.’
‘You fought in Kardiastan?’ He blinked, trying to equate Narjemah the nurse with the idea that once she had been Theura Narjemah, a soldier.
‘Yes. But I was a lot older then than you are now. And trained. And I had a cabochon that worked. I killed people. It haunts me still. Arrant, don’t be too eager to see what horror one man can inflict on another.’
‘I’m not,’ he said. And that was true. It made his stomach heave just to think about it. But I am to be Mirager one day. How can I run away from everything just because it makes me feel sick?
He glanced to where Ligea stood, arms folded, watching the barge loading. ‘Why the horse, Gev?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be damned if I will sit on some fancy cushioned flat boat to be pulled by a farting donkey all the way to Tyr. I will ride when I can.’
‘They’re mules, not donkeys,’ she pointed out. ‘And they’ll be slaves once you reach the part of the river controlled by the Exaltarch’s legions. Slaves working in shifts and moving you along twenty-four hours a day.’
‘So? Gevenan of Inge will not be hauled all the way to Tyr behind slaves, either.’
She ignored that. ‘Remember, no one will question you too carefully if you come across as a prosy old bore. You’ll find that easy, just complain bitterly to anyone who will listen about the standard of recruits these days.’
Several of the men nearby sniggered, only to be on the receiving end of one of Gevenan’s glares. He took her arm and led her out of their earshot, back towards Arrant and Narjemah. ‘Damn you, woman, are you trying to make me look a fool in the eyes of my men?’
She grinned.‘Somehow I don’t think that’s possible. Not since you took Getria. Your men worship you and you know it.’ More seriously she added, ‘I’m relying on you, Gev. If you don’t get these men safely to the walls of Tyr on time—’