Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

‘Ah, I suppose not. The swamp is foul enough as it is, without adding this to it.’ The guard nudged Conal again, this time a little harder. ‘Get up, son.’

  ‘It’s our barge,’ said the youngest boy. ‘We decide ‘bout killin’. This dead one c’n go back to the water, and the live ‘un can join him soon as we truss up his arms.’

  The guard spread his arms helplessly. ‘It’s their barge,’ he said. ‘Can’t go against their wishes.’

  The queen stepped over to the young boy. ‘Oh yes we can. The stone I gave you in payment will more than cover passage to Vindicare for all three of us. But, just to make sure, I have another stone here, an emerald, which should be more than enough to purchase this barge and the hire of a steerswoman and three competent sailors to bring her through the Maremma.’ She held out her hand. Conal could not see what lay in her palm, but the boy’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘Where was you hidin’ that?’

  ‘You didn’t find it when you went through our things, did you, Gren,’ said the queen, and the boy took a step back. ‘Are you going to take it or not?’

  ‘What are ya gonna do with the barge once we get to Vindicare? We’d buy it back at a fair price.’

  The Falthan queen laughed, a very human sound from the woman the priests knew as the Destroyer’s Consort. ‘A fair price? I’m sure. Are we agreed, then? And don’t wipe your hand on your nose this time.’

  The boy lowered his own hand from his face, grimaced shamefacedly and placed it in hers, shook it and deftly pocketed whatever she had offered him.

  ‘Robal, bring the priest to the cabin. Let’s see if we can’t get rid of some of his stink. If we succeed, perhaps we can permit him to dine with us. I have some questions for him.’

  ‘And while he’s answering them, perhaps he’ll eat my flatfish,’ Robal muttered.

  Stella asked the young priest to accompany her up to the deck, leaving Robal to pick over the remains of the fish meal. Despite his protests, the guardsman ate everything set in front of him with evident relish. She smiled. A strong, resourceful, impressive man, more intelligent than he cared to appear, who treated her with a strange but warming mixture of deference and familiarity. A man whom she hoped to persuade to accompany her on the journey ahead. Unlike the man who knelt before her now. She could think of no one she would like less as a travelling companion. Physically small, with a white, puffy face dominated by a flat nose and thick red lips sitting uneasily under thinning hair, the priest looked up at her but managed to avoid her eyes. Untrustworthy. Venal. Stella knew better than to judge a man by his appearance, but when that appearance confirmed her prejudices, it was a difficult tendency to counter. This man would bring trouble.

  A soft rain began to fall. The priest pulled his wrap closer around him, but did not complain. I have him cowed for the moment. The trick was to make the moment last as long as possible.

  ‘My name is Stella. It is the name you must always use when talking to me or about me. Since it appears in the Mahnumsen Scrolls only once I do not expect others to identify me when you use it. I will not tolerate being referred to as “the Destroyer’s Consort” or any similar epithet. Now, what is your name?’

  ‘I…Conal of Yosse, your m—Stella.’ A surprisingly deep voice for such a small man.

  ‘Yosse? The village an hour’s ride north of Longbridge?’ Stella was surprised: most of the Halite priests lived in Instruere. As the city was built on an island in the middle of the Aleinus River, it could only be approached by bridge or by boat. The northern bridge, Longbridge, was always crowded with people, making the journey a time-consuming one. Besides, living in the city gave a citizen more prestige, a higher standing in the community. There was more wealth to be had in Instruere than in the Kingdom of Deuverre to the north or Straux to the south.

  Perhaps she had wrongly assessed the man.

  ‘You serve the Archpriest directly?’

  ‘The…the Archpriest?’ The man certainly could not mask his emotions. This was a subject he wanted to avoid.

  ‘Don’t think to deceive me. I have seen you in his company regularly.’ She thinned her mouth to show her displeasure. ‘Or, at least, walking respectfully behind him. Are you a scribe designated to record his every word, working diligently to fill the eighth scroll?’

  ‘Something like that.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Though I have been promised advancement. Do I look so much like a scribe?’

  ‘A guess, no more,’ she said, though something about the man had begun to disturb her. She hoped it had been a guess, because the image of him bent over a desk, laboriously copying an old scroll, still sat strongly in her mind. She felt some sort of connection with the priest; something resonated within her, something familiar. Faint but familiar. Maybe she had met him at some function, or perhaps run across his parents. Be patient, let it settle, it will become clear. ‘An important task. Oh, and do stand up.’

  He nodded a careful agreement as he got to his feet. Out to the north distant thunder rumbled, a lazy autumn storm stalking the plains.

  ‘Why did the Archpriest send you and your late companion after me?’ Stella kept her voice pleasant. ‘Was it just to advise me as to the date of the royal funeral?’

  ‘No, my queen…er, Stella.’ He spoke with a growing confidence. ‘I’m sure you are aware that the Koinobia wishes to speak with you in detail concerning the events surrounding the Ascension of Hal Mahnumsen and the defeat of the Destroyer. You offer us a…unique perspective, and in return we offer you a chance to influence the way you have been represented in our sacred writings.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll speak with you.’

  ‘If you will not agree to share your story with us, how can you expect…I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said I’ll speak with you. Not with the Archpriest, not in his sanctum, not where a questioner can do his foul work on me. I’ll speak with you. Here, now, over the next few days. You’ll take notes and report the conversation fairly and without alteration to your Archpriest. He will decide whether to accept or reject it. But if he rejects it, you will know he is interested in something other than the truth.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Can you swim?’ she asked casually, casting a glance at the dark waters below.

  ‘You did not have me thrown overboard when doing so would have served your interests,’ the young man said, licking his lips, ‘and I cannot imagine you would do so now. Very well, I will listen to and record your views, though unless we have a witness I doubt the Archpriest will give them any credence. Perhaps your guardsman will verify our discussions?’

  ‘I am sure he will. But why would your word not be believed?’

  ‘Because the Archpriest does not know I am here,’ the small man admitted. ‘I was talked into this by the senior royal physician, whom the Archpriest asked to track you. I suspect he’ll think I’m trying to make a name for myself.’

  ‘And are you?’ She held his gaze.

  He grimaced, clearly unused to such directness. ‘Yes, I am,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m not here only for myself. I want to explain something to you…’

  His voice tailed off. In the silence the rain pattered down on the deck and the tarpaulin covering the Wodrani family’s upriver goods.

  ‘You want to offer me redemption,’ Stella said flatly. ‘You care about my moral condition. That’s lovely. The only problems are the assumptions you make. Two in particular anger me: that I am fallen far enough to need redemption, and that you are upright enough to deliver it to me. Frankly, I doubt both.’

  The priest mumbled something.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up.’ It had become harder to hear, due to a persistent and growing rumble from the north. The storm? No, this was not the sound of thunder, and there were no lightning flashes to be seen. What would make such a noise?

  ‘My lady, I said that perhaps we could suspend judgment until we have heard—’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Stella said, interrupting him. ‘Listen! What do you hear?’
>
  The rumble grew louder, then louder still. She could not tell whether what caused it was growing larger or moving closer, or both. The mist had gone but the darkness defeated her gaze. A deeper blackness…from which came an ear-splitting growling, accompanied by something that sounded like the tearing and cracking of trees. The situation went from interesting to frightening in an instant. Robal burst up onto the deck, followed by the four Wodrani. It was now impossible to hold a conversation. They could barely hear each other shout.

  Something was not right about this. Stella could feel a dreadful unease boiling in her immortal blood. A presence lurked in the storm, a knowing intelligence, enormous and inimical, and it was searching. In the back of her mind another presence, normally dull and quiescent, unfolded to full awareness.

  Him.

  Waiting for permission.

  She vacillated for a fraught moment. There were no words between them, never had been; just a tenuous link through their shared blood. What was she being asked to give her assent to?

  The thing, storm, whatever it was, bore straight for them, chewing up the swamp as it came. A depthless fear, far beyond any concern for her own death, lowered itself upon her. A howling hunger, a giant maw, gateway to an endless gullet in which waited…something terrible beyond imagining. The presence inside her head waited, patient but anxious, for her response.

  Yes.

  Something like lightning surged down from her head, along her arms, out from her fingers and up into the roaring darkness. She could feel it but not see it as it discharged from her. There was a great crack and thump, and a searing flash of light. The dark thing above her vanished, and the presence in her mind settled back to the edge of her awareness.

  Utter silence fell on the swamp, save for Ma’s perpetual muttering. Then other things started falling, many things, crashing through the foliage some distance from the boat then splashing into the river somewhat nearer. The sounds stopped.

  ‘What was that?’ the priest, Conal, asked. ‘I’ve never heard anything like that.’

  ‘Sounded like a—’ the oldest Wodrani boy began, but was interrupted by a series of thumps and splashes all around them. On the deck, in the water, then falling on them were hundreds, thousands of solid objects.

  Stella cried out with pain as something hit the back of her neck. She fell to the deck, her hands covering her head. ‘What is it? What is this?’ she screamed. The rain continued.

  ‘Kingfrogs!’ one of the boys shouted. ‘It’s raining kingfrogs!’

  The things were enormous, at least a foot long, though with the splatter they made on the deck and the lack of light it was difficult to tell.

  ‘Get y’ ‘lowdecks!’ Ma bellowed. ‘Be more’m froggies next!’

  Stella half-crawled, half-scrambled over a slimy deck to the hatch, suffering more painful blows to her back and legs. Behind her Robal waited patiently, hands above his head, until the hatchway cleared. He closed it behind him, then moved into the crowded cabin and held out his hand.

  ‘You were right, Ma,’ he said. ‘Flatfish.’

  The thumping continued intermittently above them for a few minutes longer, slowly dying away into silence.

  ‘Ma says she’s seen this afore,’ the youngest boy explained. ‘On Espumere, not far fr’m here, ‘bout this time a year. Big whirlwind over the lake, she saw, then a rain o’ fish. Whirlwind sucks ‘em up and drops ‘em.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Robal, a nervous look on his face. ‘I know many who would consider such an event ominous.’

  ‘They would, were they not of the Koinobia,’ the priest said with a superior air. ‘The Kingdom of Hal will replace such superstition with fact.’

  Despite herself, Stella rose to the bait. ‘And respect for others?’

  ‘Not if they’re wrong.’

  She grimaced: the priest has teeth.

  The hatch opened and another of the Wodrani boys—the middle one, Philla—poked his bandaged head into the cabin.

  ‘Kingfrogs, catfish, swamp snakes, flatfish, pout and eel. Anything livin’ in the swamp now collected on th’ barge. All dead, all squished. Good eating, ‘cept for the frogs.’

  Stella made a face as the lad’s brothers climbed up through the hatchway and into the night.

  ‘I don’t see how the frogs could be any worse than the flatfish,’ Robal said. ‘Everything we eat tastes of swamp. How much longer until we reach Vindicare?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she replied. ‘Philla said it can take two or three weeks to navigate the Maremma.’

  The burly guardsman put his head in his hands. ‘May Philla be proved wrong, if it please Hal,’ he groaned.

  Philla was proved wrong, though Robal was not happy about it. Conal heard him say so many times every day. A full month after they had entered the Maremma the Wodrani barge finally emerged from the swamplands to make the relatively straightforward journey to Vindicare. The river ran lower than Ma, who had travelled the Aleinus for thirty years, had ever seen, making travel extremely hard work. Apart from that one freakish night of thunderstorms, whirlwinds and raining frogs, the days were relentlessly humid and rainless, the nights sultry and almost unbearable. The swamp seemed to dry up around them: large-leaved lilies browning around the edges, the multicoloured, delicate orchids withering, dead fish littering the stagnant pools cut off from their water source, and the Great River Aleinus shrivelling until the travellers could see her bones. And the stink! Rot and decay made the close, stale air of the tiny cabin infinitely preferable to spending time abovedecks, and no one looked forward to the two shifts of poling everyone was required to do daily. Only the cicadas seemed to thrive, if the racket they set up day and night was any guide. The heat was incredible.

  ‘Never seen weather like it, and I bin up ’n’ down the river fer twelve years,’ the oldest boy, Jarner, told them time and again. ‘Ma disremembers weather like it too, and she’s bin…’

  Conal tuned the words out. He had a great deal to think about, having spent at least two hours every day poling the boat in the company of the Destroyer’s Consort. He asked questions, he listened to her answers, and gradually a story emerged worryingly different to Holy Writ. Not necessarily more favourable to the queen, surprisingly. The picture Stella painted of herself was of a self-absorbed girl, one with courage bordering on foolhardiness mixed with contempt for her family and her village. So many details flatly contradicted the scrolls. ‘She sought to leave the village with them, looking for adventure and to seek her fortune, and none of the Company could stand against her will.’ So read the Second Scroll, line ninety-two. Not so, Stella said. She had thought the Mahnumsen brothers were dead, as did the rest of the village, killed by the Bhrudwan raiders along with their parents. After all, she had been to their funeral. Why would she have sought them out deliberately if she thought they were dead? No, she had stumbled across them and they had forced her to accompany them, fearing she would expose their plan to the village.

  The young priest had no answer to this. The queen—Stella—could be deceiving him, but she sounded truthful to his ears. She told him of her attraction to Wira, the formidable young mountain man the Company met along the Westway; and, the way she described it, she had virtually thrown herself at him. Why would she have told him that, knowing it reflected badly on her later behaviour with Deorc, the Destroyer’s lieutenant, and the Destroyer himself, unless it was true? The truth of it counted against her, but her willingness to share it counted in her favour. So confusing. ‘And the girl, the snake among them, bided her time until she could snare a man of power through whom to rule.’ That from the Fourth Scroll, line two hundred and twelve. Again, close to the truth but inside out, Stella responded when he quoted this to her. She had wanted a man of significance, she told him, but only because she felt so insignificant herself.

  It made sense, the way she told it.

  Day after day of discussion, sometimes tense, often slow and fragmentary, as she made herself relive the
events of seventy years ago, and still the story was but a third complete. He knew she intended to part company with him at Vindicare, but he would think of some way to remain with her until her story was told.

  She asked him about his own background. He would not tell her his big secret, of course; there was no knowing what she would make of it, but it was certain that if she found out about his own journey to Andratan her openness would end. Instead he told her of his upbringing, of his large family and elderly parents, of staying at home in Yosse to look after his ailing mother while his siblings found employment in far-flung parts of Faltha. Of the contentment he found in the Koinobia, particularly in the discipline and insight scholarship offered. Of the pride he felt when the Archpriest himself had sought him out. He told her of the day the holy man sat cross-legged on the flaxen floor of their house and asked him to serve the Koinobia as a Halite priest.

  She was surprised and somewhat embarrassed when Conal told her that she, Stella Pellwen, had been his specialty. He had studied the Mahnumsen Scrolls and could recite them word for word. Had spoken to anyone he could find who had memories of that time and, though most of the Company were now dead, learned that people held memories at odds with the Writ. The senior clerics were pleased with his progress, and for the last three years he, Conal of Yosse, had been considered the foremost authority on the Destroyer’s Consort—‘begging your pardon,’ he hastily added. That was why, he supposed, the Archpriest had asked Conal to accompany him to the bedside of the dying King Leith.

  The woman opposite him—the subject of a decade or more of his most careful research—was clearly uncomfortable with this knowledge. ‘You’re crazy,’ she’d said with her characteristic and strangely endearing bluntness. ‘How can such an obsession possibly be a healthy thing? And if you wanted to find out what really happened, why did you not simply ask me?’

  Conal had shaken his head. ‘It is not simple to ask her majesty anything,’ he had replied. ‘Even with the influence of the Koinobia and a letter written personally by the Archpriest himself I could not secure an interview with you. I was fobbed off with every manner of excuse.’