by Steven Poore
“Ah – we have our storyteller. Our entertainment for the evening, perhaps?”
So far Cassia had seen nothing to change her opinion of the man. He was far too fond of himself, and he seemed to think his intellect and wit much superior to her own. He is laughing at me, she thought. Or at least, at something he knows that I don’t.
She paused before the first couches, trying to ignore the young courtiers who peered at her with open curiosity. Rais smiled and clapped his hands. “The rest of you will, alas, have to find your entertainment elsewhere this evening. This will be a private meeting.”
The courtiers left, making sounds of disappointment, bowing to Rais as they exited the garden. The open space was even more uncomfortable now. Cassia realised she had wrapped her arms across her body in a defensive stance, and she quickly clasped her hands behind her back instead. There was no point giving Rais more than he already had.
“You’re not a commander of the Watch,” she said, before Rais could speak again.
He crossed to one of the tables and selected an apple. “I am, I’m afraid to say. But not only that. You should try some of these – they’re from the Palace’s own orchards. The last of the season’s crop. Tender and not too sweet.”
As hungry as she was, she managed – barely – to resist the urge to run over and gather up as much as she could in the bundled front of her shirt. Instead she straightened her spine and watched while Rais loaded a plate with food. He took his time, reminding her more of the Emperor’s Factors in the North than a soldier of any description. His hair was oiled and artfully tousled, and his dark beard was cropped close to his chin. He looked like a man who wanted for nothing.
“You must be hungry. I don’t believe you have eaten since yesterday.”
“Is this your idea of entertainment?” Cassia snapped at last. “To taunt your prisoners with opulence and expensive foods? What does that gain you?”
“A full stomach.” Rais shrugged. “If you will not eat, you will not eat. So much for the pleasantries. Now – I think you know how tenuous your position is here in Galliarca, yes? You are this close from being cast out from the Mountain Gate with the criminals and unsavoury foreigners the Watch has gathered over the last few days. Now you must convince me why that should not be the case. I suggest you begin by explaining why a district of the mede – a district that I am responsible for – has been gutted by sorcery. After that we shall consider the small matter of two dead men and the wounds dealt to the scholar Karak.”
He returned to one of the couches and stared up at her expectantly.
Cassia felt cold. The drums beat softly in time to her pulse. It was pressure. All of this was pressure, designed to make her fold and cry out for mercy. The food, the decanters of water and wine that sat on the tables, the fine furnishings and noble company – all there to disorient and intimidate her after the time she had spent in that cramped cell. But she had seen the mists that Malessar’s wards held back. Seen them, fought them, and lived through it all. She had flown upon a dragon. She had crept through the library of Hellea, where no woman was allowed to go. And she had survived the great duel between Malessar and Baum. Compared to all of that, Rais had nothing with which to threaten her.
She could confront him without fear. As an equal. That was a revelation. Cassia turned away from him so that she could compose herself again.
And Malessar – Karak – was still alive. That disclosure, no doubt unintended, lent her further strength. She walked slowly around the garden, surveying the tables, examining each dish, and even daring to take one of the slender silvered goblets of wine, before she returned to the circle of couches. There might have been a faint trace of irritation in Rais’s expression, but it was smoothed away before she could take any satisfaction in it.
“Well?” he asked.
“I could tell you everything that I know as truth, and you would not believe me,” Cassia said. “How would that benefit me at all? And you’re just a Watchman – what do you know of sorcery?”
Rais lifted one hand. “What I was taught by the scholars my father employed to complete my education. And they were very good scholars, Cassia. For one season I learned the rudiments of alchemy from Karak himself. Perhaps you can understand my personal interest in this affair.”
Malessar had said that he sometimes acted as a teacher as well as a scholar, but Cassia was sure he had also said it was a relationship with one particular family more than it was employment. The king’s family. And that meant Rais was . . .
A prince. A man who might one day rule Galliarca. She had been so entranced by the mede and the flow of stories within Fahrian Square that she had never paid attention to the higher echelons of the city. Now the princes had turned their attention upon her.
This time she could not hide her unease. Rais only smiled, as though he had anticipated everything. “We talked more of sorcery than of alchemy. Never anything that had any practical application, unfortunately. I always felt that he tied me to shallow waters. I wanted more than just sleight-of-hand and other small tricks.”
“What prince needs small tricks?” Cassia wondered aloud.
His answering smile was one of condescension. “One who has three elder brothers. If I am not born to rule, then I must seek another direction in life.”
“As a Watchman?” She could not help the note of disbelief that crept into her voice.
“Amongst other things, as I have already said. Now: the truth of the matter, please.”
Cassia paused to sip her wine, using the opportunity to gather her thoughts. Rais had gone to great lengths to impress upon her how much trouble she was in, as if she didn’t know that already. The situation was grave enough that falsehoods were out of the question. The issue might be how much of the truth Rais actually needed to know.
“You must have heard of Caenthell,” she began. “The great Northern kingdom that straddled the Age of Talons.”
Rais shook his head and sighed. “Of course I have. But I asked for truth, not a story.”
“The story is the truth. You cannot have one without the other. If you want to hear it, then you will have to hear it all.” Cassia moderated her firm tone by bowing her head in his direction. Rais looked away after a moment, then gestured for her to continue.
She wet her lips again. The wine was sweet and unwatered, and tasted even better than the Stromondorian vintages she had tried aboard the Rabbit. As she talked she paced around the couches. It felt easier to talk in this manner, as she would have done in Fahrian Square. It felt much less like an interrogation.
She started in the mountains, with Jedrell’s rise and his estrangement from his father. His struggle for acclaim and acceptance, and his eventual return with the sorcerer Malessar in tow, the flags of his legion flying bright over the Hamiardin Pass. The battle for control of Caenthell, and Malessar’s departure to Kalakhadze. Cassia was aware of Rais’s presence, but while she could treat him as her audience it was easy enough to ignore him. She fell into the rhythm she found most comfortable, and the tale flowed out naturally. Jedrell fell in love with Aliciana, and she bore him a child. And then Malessar returned – to seek the hand of his sweetheart – and the tragedy erupted all over again.
“How is this relevant?” Rais asked. “Even if it happened as you say, no man escaped from Caenthell. And certainly no living man remembers it.”
“Malessar was at Stromondsea,” Cassia said.
“A man who went by that name was there,” Rais corrected her with a bored smile. “Or may have been there.”
“And Malessar was in Kebria, too. That was only half a century ago.”
The prince’s eyes narrowed. “The Court heard rumours of a sorcerer in Kebria, before Hellea went there. No, I think the tale-tellers are making much from nothing there.”
Cassia shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the more important fact is that one man did escape from Caenthell before the curse took hold. One man and a child. Jedrell’s child. They had Py
raete’s protection. And Baum swore vengeance before the God of the North. He nurtured that child, and kept watch on the boy’s descendants, and learned sorcery so that in time he could confront Malessar as an equal.”
Now Rais was interested again. “I have not heard this version of the story.”
“I would be surprised if you had,” Cassia said. “Until now, only one man knew it for certain. And he lies dead.”
“The man at Karak’s dhar,” Rais concluded. “How convenient. So you say he was a sorcerer – he was this Baum?”
She nodded.
“And Karak? Ah, I see: you say that the scholar is not who he seems and that the final act of a great Northern tragedy has been played out upon our streets.” Rais paused, his gaze rising again to hold her own, the intensity of his stare redoubled and disconcerting. “A troubling notion.”
You don’t know just how troubling. Cassia prayed that he did not connect every piece of the puzzle so fast. To prevent her eyes betraying her deepest secrets she turned away, crossing back to one of the tables. The servants had already restocked the plates. Everything was arranged with a precision that would have shamed the drills of the Factor’s legions.
“How can I know this is the truth?” Rais called after her.
“You gave me no reason to lie,” Cassia replied. And that was the truth as well: the choice between expulsion and servitude was no choice at all.
At last his smile had disappeared, replaced by a thoughtful frown. “By Karak’s own logic, one cannot deny the evidence if it has been witnessed at first hand. But I have not witnessed it and, I dare say, neither have you. You certainly do not look nine hundred years old. I will need better proof than this before I can accept your story.”
But I’ve seen it all, Cassia wanted to shout at him. I saw everything – the fight, the horrible waves of sorcery that burned all the colour from the walls and the ground, the determination upon Jedrell’s face, the armies marching down from the Hamiardin Pass, the wraiths that sought to leech the life from the very stones of the fort above Karakhel . . .
She clenched her fists so tight her fingernails bit into her palms. Rais was right. He had seen none of this; he would not believe her. Just as he would not believe her if she told him that she was the Heir to the North, or if she tried to warn him about the malevolence bound up behind the wards of Malessar’s curse – a twisted, vengeful evil that was now free to gorge itself upon the North. And it would not stop there, she knew instinctively. Jedrell’s ambitions and his hunger for dominance were legendary. Even Baum had never denied that. After nine hundred years of imprisonment, sustained only by sorcery and cold vengeance, what would Jedrell’s spirit hunger for?
The drums reminded her of the apparent inevitability of it all and she sank down onto one of the couches before her legs gave way beneath her. She hadn’t realised she was so tired.
“That is the tale,” she said quietly. “Whether you believe it or not, I can tell no more.”
“But you can,” Rais said. He stood and brought her a freshly filled goblet of chilled water. Cassia took it with mute gratitude, aware that he already believed her to be in his debt. “All of that happened at the end of the Age of Talons. None of it explains to me why Malessar would choose to live in secrecy here in Galliarca. Or why this Baum would choose now to take vengeance for the North. Or, indeed, what happens now this curse has apparently been lifted.”
“I have no answer to that,” Cassia said. From the look in Rais’s eyes, however, he had seen through her evasion. He is still playing games with me.
The prince allowed the uncomfortable silence to drag on until she laid the emptied goblet aside. Then he raised one hand to beckon to the guards stationed at the far end of the garden. “So, we still require proof. Perhaps there is one way to obtain it. Will you accompany me, Cassia?”
She sighed at his overly solicitous tone. A question to which there was only one answer. Games.
“As you command, my lord.”
Their destination lay beyond another of the innumerable courtyards. There were courtiers here too, talking behind their hands as Cassia passed, laughing and smirking at the condition of her clothing and the fact that she was under armed guard. A few even eyed her as though she had to be a new piece of some courtly intrigue, but there were more soldiers and palace staff too, present yet invisible, reminding her of the scale of the gap between herself and Galliarca’s nobility.
Rais’s small party passed through the halls with no fanfare and made no waves at all in the waters of the Court. He was the fourth son, relatively unimportant. All the focus was on his elder brothers. She knew of Haidar, the king’s firstborn son, and of Olim, the next in line, but she had not been in Galliarca long enough to learn the names of the remainder of the king’s family. A mistake on her own part, she knew now, but perhaps it also meant Rais was free to do as he wished without the Court scrutinising his every movement.
Before she could follow those thoughts any further, Rais came to a door flanked by another pair of guards – both armed with hooked polearms and the slender swords common to Galliarca, but clad in polished armour rather the mail and green cloaks of the Watch. They stood aside smartly to allow Rais – and, reluctantly, Cassia too – into the room beyond.
It was a sick room, she realised quickly. It was light and airy, a breeze blowing the scent of burning oils through the air. Thin silken drapes hung against the walls to create a softer environment than the plaster and copper-coloured tiles would otherwise have allowed. Several young women of Peleana’s order busied themselves about the room, moving between the small shrine on one side to the bed opposite. The low chants of prayers and songs flowed through each other, interweaving like the threads of a blanket, soft and comforting. It felt distinctly odd to come across such a haven of peace within the palace.
Rais turned back to her as she stood on the threshold. “Go forward. First let us see if he recognises you.”
It was Malessar, of course, laid out like a corpse on a bed so large it diminished even further a body already withered by the magic he had expended. His slack skin looked as pale as the sheets themselves, his hands resting on his chest as though he was the statue carved atop a funerary bier. Cassia could not see any rise and fall of his chest.
“My honoured father’s command,” Rais said quietly behind her. “Once he knew of the scholar’s wounds, he would not allow him to rest at that house. He is a sorcerer, perhaps – the evidence is not yet conclusive, despite what you have said tonight – but he once rendered service to the king of Galliarca. We still honour such service.”
Strangely, the drums had eased in her head, as though Peleana’s healing peace kept them at bay. There was a stool at one side of the bed and Cassia sank onto it, her attention still fixed upon the unconscious warlock. Unlike at the dhar, after their expedition to Caenthell only a few weeks ago, she could not feel the tingling frisson of sorcery with which Malessar had surrounded himself. That had been a spell cast to speed the process of recovery, she remembered. Without that spell, how slow and uncertain would that recovery be this time?
And they put you in a cell, a voice whispered to her. No such courtesy or hospitality there. Not for a mere girl of the North.
The healers had fallen back to the opposite wall. Cassia looked into their faces, expecting to weather their distrust and disapproval, but she saw only curiosity and a professional concern for their charge. Peleanna was day to Kolus’s night; a goddess of air and life wedded forever to a god of the immortal opposites, of blood and earth. Norrow had recited enough of the histories of the Galliarcan gods that Cassia thought she knew how she might help.
It has to be worth the attempt, at least. There was nothing to be lost.
“Artrevia,” she said, focusing upon the nearest of the healers. “If he can be brought into the open air – exposed to a breeze from the sea – Artrevia may lend him strength.”
There was a flicker of distaste in the woman’s expression, as the Hellean
gods had always been anathema to both Peleanna and Kolus, but after a moment the healer nodded her understanding and the women withdrew again to confer amongst themselves.
Rais regarded her with frank amusement. “One might think you were used to issuing such commands,” he said. As she flushed and began to protest, the prince raised a hand and waved her back to silence. “You are no mere storyteller, no matter what you would have me believe.”
I am the Heir to the North.
She shook the thought away and deliberately turned her attention back to Malessar. The warlock had still not moved, and only the faint pulsing of the arteries in his neck proved he lived. She reached over to touch his hand. His skin was cold and dry, and felt as old as the mountains themselves – but now she thought there was a distant echo of the tingle of sorcery too. Whether that trace was a fading remnant of Malessar’s power, or whether it indicated the first faltering steps on a long road to recovery, she had no way of telling.
I know nothing of magic. What am I doing, that I believe I know even this much? Just because I have talked with two sorcerers . . .
“What would you have me do?” she asked Rais.
“Talk to him,” the Prince replied. “The sisters say he has awoken before, for very short periods of time. He appears to know where he is. Talk to him and see if he awakens.”
Cassia took a long breath, considering what to say. “Sir. Sir, it’s Cassia. I’m safe and well. We’re both safe. Can you hear me, sir?”
There was no response, not the slightest movement. She tried again, adding in Leili’s name this time. When that did not work either, with Rais watching her with his arms folded in exaggerated patience, she sighed and took a different approach.
“Fleet-footed Pelicos, outrunning his tongue, a curse of the gods who blighted his life with contests, diversions and sirens alike, washed up in winter on the shores of the Krale. He stabbed at the sand that had tickled his toes – ”
A coughed exhalation and a twitch of the fingers of one hand. Cassia stumbled to a halt.