Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  ‘No decision has yet been made. Stella and I will talk about it and will convey our decision to you when we’re ready to.’ His words didn’t fool the priest, whose grin grew even wider.

  An animal-like moan spun them around in the direction of the cabin. Is the magician really dead? Has he come back to life?

  A broad-shouldered man staggered drunkenly onto the path. Robal went for his sword, only to realise it lay on the floor of the cabin, still covered in the magician’s blood.

  The man tripped over a tree root and went down on one knee. His teeth clacked together and he moaned again like a cow in distress. His struggle to regain his feet was painful to watch.

  ‘He has lost his mind,’ said the priest, and took a step towards the path.

  ‘Literally,’ Robal said. The back of the man’s head had been laid open, the skull smashed and hanging, leaving visible a wet redness.

  Stella put a knuckle in her mouth. ‘Do something,’ she pleaded with Robal.

  ‘This was the priest’s doing,’ said the guardsman. ‘Tell him to finish what he started.’

  ‘Conal did this?’

  ‘Just before he ran the Lord of Fear through with my sword. Now turn away. Priest, go and fetch my sword. I have a mercy to perform.’

  Once before, a decade ago at the bitter end of the Border Wars, Robal had used his blade to end a wounded man’s suffering. Sent east by a nervous Council concerned about the behaviour of the Piskasian army, he and another Instruian guardsman were ostensibly serving as mercenaries when the Hantils, tribesmen from Birinjh, invaded over the Armatura Mountains in search of grain. They had been driven back twice in the previous three years by a ruthless Piskasian force, but a prolonged drought in their homeland gave the tribesmen little choice but to sweep down on the rich cornfields of the Eastern Highlands. The fighting had been desperate, with no quarter given; and at the rump end of victory he and Peler were ambushed by a Hantil family unconnected with the fighting. Peler tried not to take any lives, but his caution lost him his own, hamstrung and then disembowelled by two boys who came upon him in stealth, and then fled in the direction of the mountains. By the time Robal fought off the mother and father his fellow Instruian was near death, begging for the only release Robal could offer him.

  Affected by emotion, Robal’s chest thrust had not been as steady as Peler needed. The harrowing few seconds that passed before Robal forced himself to take his friend’s head dominated his dreams.

  The image of Peler’s anguished face, the sound of his screaming, even the involuntary twist of the blade in his hand as he scored a rib, came rolling back to Robal as he took the sword from the priest’s hand and strode over to the suffering man. This time he did not allow sentiment to mar his stroke. He had learned his lesson. The hideously damaged brute died before he hit the ground.

  Robal had cleaned and sheathed his blade by the time Stella and the priest turned back to him. He met their questioning faces with a short, professional nod, determined not to let them see how much the task had cost him.

  Stella had other things on her mind. ‘Conal slew the Lord of Fear? Conal saved me?’ She gazed at the moon-faced priest with surprise and something approaching admiration in her eyes.

  Robal kept his features smooth, allowing none of his resentment to show. ‘Yes, your majesty, you were saved by the brave actions of a Halite priest.’ If that were not ironic enough to make his point, he would despair of her.

  ‘Would someone care to explain how this might be?’ Stella seemed unhappy; suspecting, perhaps, that she was being lied to.

  The priest beamed his rude grin at her. ‘You’ll have plenty of time to hear the story behind your rescue as we travel,’ he said.

  We’ll hear it many times, no doubt, Robal thought, not trusting himself to speak.

  Of necessity the three travellers spent the night in the cabin. They were, after all, probably still being hunted by the greycloak Koinobia guards from Vindicare. Conal was surprised by how tidy the small house had been kept; cleanliness had associations with good morals as taught by the Koinobia, so, he reasoned, the reverse must also be true. The Archpriest always kept his study immaculate, a virtue any scholar could respect, though even he would have appreciated the domestic organisation evident here.

  The priest twitched uneasily as he lay on the floor. The link between his fastidious Archpriest and the repulsive Lord of Fear was surely an inappropriate one; but, once made, the connection proved difficult to sever.

  Conal had been given the task of disposing of the remains of the Maghdi Dasht. An ignominious end to who knows how long a life of evil, he cajoled himself into thinking as he swept the flakes of skin and bone into a pan. Just a pile of ashes. The lie almost worked, undone when he made his way down to the river and tipped out the pan, only for the breeze to blow the ashes back in his face. He choked and vomited for half an hour, until the guardsman had come looking for him. The stern-faced man brought him back to the cabin and gave him a cup of water.

  Now he lay close to the place where Stella’s blood had gathered. Robal had cleaned that, thank the Most High. The events of the day were murky at best; for some reason Conal could not remember anything clearly after stepping out of the boat on this side of the river. Robal had said something about him striking a man down—the one whom Robal had later killed; an action the priest considered distasteful, though necessary—and slaying the Lord of Fear. Impossible, of course. Who more than he, a student of the Falthan War, knew how difficult the Maghdi Dasht were to kill? Robal must be spinning a tale, lying to cover something up. But, if so, why could Conal not remember the events surrounding the Lord of Fear’s death?

  His thoughts turned to Stella. She was the true mystery. He had come to himself to find her hanging above him, while he knelt at her feet. Dead, bled out like a sheep or a cow, then alive again. Immortal, Robal had said. He desperately, so desperately, wanted not to believe it.

  Despite all she had said to him, notwithstanding her friendly, open manner, she had kept her true secret hidden from him. He was her historian, her hope of avoiding the judgment of the Koinobia. How had she expected this evasion to serve her? Unless she had never intended for him to know.

  Instead of maintaining his scholarly reserve, questioning all she said and putting her words to the test, he had fawned over her like an acolyte over his master. Had increasingly taken her word as truth. She had betrayed him. Made him into a fool.

  No, it was important to be accurate. He had made himself into a fool.

  Stella Pellwen, the Destroyer’s Consort, was immortal. Now he knew the coin with which she had been paid for her treachery. Oh, and what coin it was! Never to die, to exist on and on, growing in wisdom and knowledge over the centuries, successive generations to enlighten: a prize to be favoured above all others. The thought of it made his chest ache with barely suppressed desire.

  And when were you going to share your own little secret with Stella? said a voice in the back of his mind. A bitter voice, the unwelcome prompting of his conscience. He made himself face it. It was the key to his life, this constant attempt at honesty; a continual stripping away of the pride that accumulated around men with his talents.

  His own little secret. How might the Destroyer’s Consort react to learn that her travelling companion had been part of a Halite information-gathering team that had penetrated all the way to Andratan itself? They had spent a week in the fortress of their enemy, guests of a high-ranking Bhrudwan official whom they had convinced to extend them an invitation, believing them to be lawmakers from Bhu-bhu Nghosa. Andratan was an enormous place. He had not seen the Destroyer during his visit, spending the entire time dreading an encounter that never happened. The Halites were feted by their Archpriest on their return; Conal elevated along with the rest of them, becoming a senior figure in the Koinobia virtually overnight.

  Not that you knew the Archpriest’s plans for political control of Faltha. The voice again. How senior had he really been? Certainly not p
art of the inner circle that counted.

  Yet in his hands he now held a secret that would admit him to any Halite circle he cared to join.

  The priest, the guardsman and the queen left the cabin as early as possible the next morning, pausing only to take as much food as they could carry. Conal found himself tidying up after the other two; he was not normally the most tidy fellow and his own actions puzzled him, until he remembered his thoughts of the previous night. He immediately found himself in an impossible position: to continue cleaning in order to verify his own goodness, or to cease his tidying so as not to identify with the Lord of Fear—or the Archpriest. He cursed his foolish mind, but could not dismiss his feelings of discomfort. Such are the problems facing a sophisticated man, he reassured himself. Or a half-insane fool, whispered a small voice at the back of his mind.

  As they closed the door of the cabin the attention of the three travellers was drawn to the nearby forest. Conal could hear moaning and crying, as though from someone in distress. In front of him Robal drew his sword, waved the others to stillness, and went forward to investigate. He returned, red-faced with anger and breathing heavily. ‘I should have let the brute suffer,’ he said, which was to Conal no explanation at all.

  The guardsman led Conal and Stella to a small clearing in the forest a few hundred paces from the cabin. There stood a small enclosure, roofed with thatch and surrounded by thick stone walls, within which were imprisoned a number of people. Women, girls and boys, Conal noted with rising horror. No men visible through the grilled windows. The prisoners, if that was what they were, cried out anew on seeing the strangers approach.

  The structure had a door made of iron bars, located on the far side from the cabin, secured by an enormous brass padlock. Robal sent Conal back to the cabin to search for a key. As the priest left the clearing he saw Robal lift a large block of stone and smash it against the lock in an attempt to break it open.

  There was no key to be found in the cabin. Conal could have told Robal that if the guardsman had been prepared to listen. Conal had, after all, spent some time tidying there. Instead, he set himself to search the body of the man he had supposedly hit on the head with a tree branch, the man whom Robal had slain the previous day. It was a dreadful task; though the corpse did not yet smell he imagined he could sense the rottenness of decay, and flies were becoming interested in the horrible wound to the back of the man’s head. The man needed burying, a task which ought to have fallen to him; but he’d never buried anyone before, had never seen a dead body until the night Dribna drowned in the Maremma. Conal hoped he’d not be asked. He searched hurriedly through the pockets of the tunic, eventually finding a small purse containing a key and a number of shiny coins. He suffered no pangs of conscience as he took the purse for himself.

  Sensibly, the guardsman had given up bashing the lock by the time Conal returned. The mechanism was a little bent but essentially undamaged, and the key turned with ease. A click and the padlock fell away, the door swung open and more than twenty people walked slowly, hesitantly, out into the clearing.

  Most of them, including all of the children, were near-naked and dirty; the remainder wore tattered and filthy garments. Some swung their heads from side to side as if scanning for danger, others collapsed to the ground and began to sob, and a few stood in the open, faces immobile, giving no impression they comprehended their surroundings. Three remained in the structure, standing with the same blank stare. Two more lay unmoving on the reed-covered floor, staring up at the iron bars below the thatch.

  ‘What has happened to you?’ Stella asked the prisoners. ‘Who has done this to you?’

  ‘We aren’t allowed to talk,’ said one of the older girls. Some of the others flinched as she spoke. ‘Have to keep quiet. If we talk they do us.’

  Conal saw Stella’s face harden. ‘You can talk now,’ she said. ‘We have killed your captors. You are safe.’

  ‘Safe?’ The girl spoke the word as if she had no idea of its meaning. ‘Show me their dead bodies. Show me where the ghost and his two boys lie. Dig them up and show them to me. When I see them dead, then I’ll feel safe.’

  ‘Two boys?’ Robal said quietly, flicking his sword out and assuming a fighter’s stance. At this, the prisoners drew together, and a few of them ran for the safety of their prison.

  The guardsman turned to Stella. ‘Do you remember two thugs?’ His voice remained soft, but Conal could hear the doubt in his words.

  The queen raised her chin as she answered. ‘You ask what I can remember? Have you ever died and come back to life again? Yesterday’s events are a dream.’ She paused, then put a hand to her forehead. ‘Now I think on it, I can recall hearing conversations…there were two of them.’ Her head dropped. ‘Oh, Robal, I am sorry. I didn’t want to think about what happened.’

  ‘Three chairs, three beds,’ Conal said. ‘Stella is not the only one to miss the obvious.’

  ‘So there is a second ruffian about.’ Robal scowled at the forest eaves. ‘We will talk later about yesterday.’

  ‘He won’t be far away,’ said Stella. ‘He will have seen us leave—’

  A bear-like roar rose up from somewhere behind them, in the direction of the cabin. The rest of the prisoners fled back into their cage as a broad-shouldered man lumbered into the clearing, sticks in both hands. ‘You killed Tunza!’ he shouted. ‘You done in me da!’ Without pause he threw himself at them, swinging the sticks as he came.

  It was an execution. Conal had never seen one before; though they were infrequent in Instruere, most people had been to see at least one, to satisfy their curiosity if nothing more. The priest thought them morbid. Now, as Robal stepped smoothly forward and thrust his sword unerringly into the berserk man’s chest, then jerked it out again, Conal realised that an execution cast a glamour all of its own. He watched the body continue forward, life already gone, its momentum sending it crashing against the wall of the cage, to fall on its back, eyes wide and staring. I am alive, he told the corpse in relief, and you are dead. I am alive because I am good, and you have been punished because you are evil. It felt almost as if he had borrowed life from the newly-dead man.

  Just how evil the man and his brother had been began to emerge when the captives recovered enough to talk.

  ‘Tunza and Ramzy would come and choose someone, do ‘em and then kill ‘em. Always over there, where we could see ‘em.’ The speaker, a boy no older than twelve, cried as he talked and made no effort to clean the snot running from his nose. ‘Said we was rewards given ‘em by their father for bein’ good.’

  A little girl, surely six years old if not younger, said: ‘They catched us, they catched us!’ It was all she could manage, and nothing anyone said to her could encourage her to say anything more.

  ‘Ramzy done Faira yesterday,’ said the older girl who had first spoken. ‘She’d been here longer than anyone. Months and months. Ramzy and Tunza both hated her, they said, because she had a harelip. Didn’t stop Ramzy though.’ She shuddered and turned away from where the brute lay. ‘Took his time, then ran off when he heard shouting. We haven’t seen anyone since, not even at sunset. They feed us at sunset, you see.’

  ‘Most High,’ Stella breathed, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘How long has this been going on? Please, someone tell me it has not been happening for seventy years.’ Her face was white with shock.

  Robal put an arm around her shaking frame, though his face held as little colour as hers. Conal wondered why he felt nothing as yet. Because these unfortunates are of no account, said the voice in the back of his mind. Because you have a great deal yet to achieve, and will not allow yourself to be distracted by such things. The words sounded reasonable, but something in his mind rebelled against them, recognising the horror they contained.

  Conal listened with increasing detachment to the rest of the captives’ story. The prisoners had been taken from the river, mostly, though some had been surprised in the fields, and dragged through the reeds and the forest to thei
r prison. The deaths were irregular, sometimes with a week or more between visits from the brothers. Punishments for speaking or struggling were ruthless, and the two men had made it clear they could make death protracted or merciful depending on the prisoner’s behaviour. The freed captives would have continued to volunteer information, but Stella put a stop to the flow of horrific description. Robal had by this time clapped his hands over his ears.

  ‘We have to leave,’ Conal said into the silence following the tales of torment. ‘My queen, you are being hunted by the Koinobia. If you wish to remain free, you cannot remain here. And I would like to find someone to treat my arm.’

  ‘The priest speaks sense,’ Robal rumbled. ‘And I do not want to stay in this clearing a moment longer.’

  ‘But we have people to care for,’ Stella said, anguish in her voice. ‘How can we leave them to survive in the wild? Look at them; some can barely stand.’

  ‘What do you propose we do?’ The guardsman lifted her chin and looked down into her red-rimmed eyes. ‘March them back to Vindicare? Alert the authorities? You will be handing yourself to the priests. I will not let that happen, my dear.’ He dropped his hand. ‘Of course we will not abandon them. We will lead them north, away from the river and through the forest, until we find a village or a farmhouse. Then they will no longer be our problem. Will you agree to this?’

  After a time, Stella gave him a clearly reluctant nod.

  In the end three of the former prisoners did not complete the journey. One refused to come, spitting and fighting with teeth and fists and nails whenever anyone approached too closely. So they supplied her with some food and left her there. A second girl, terrified of the dark, ran off during the first night. And they woke to find a boy dead on the morning of the third day, the day they discovered a village. He had stopped breathing some time during the night. Robal could find no evidence of physical damage, and had no other explanation for his sudden death.