The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  “More fool him, then,” Lianna said. She flicked one hand in the direction of the doors, and her bodyguard shifted his weight forward. The audience was plainly finished.

  Cassia remained where she was, furious and humiliated. Arca shuffled in place, unable to lift his head or meet her gaze. Lianna only tilted her head again. The smile she wore was thin and frozen, a whisker away from anger. When she lifted her hand again to beckon her attendants back into the room, Cassia half expected the great statues in the corners to walk forward to threaten her.

  Statues. No, she thought. Surely not.

  Rais took her arm. She shrugged free of his grip and made her own way back across the floor. Partway to the door however, she veered away, towards the nearest of the dormant figures. As she did so, she thought back to the shrine on the western trade road, on the edge of the Empire’s territory. The silent ranks of stone soldiers, all part of Malessar’s grand scheme to secure the future of the new Empire he had founded after the fall of the North, waiting across the centuries to be called into duty. These figures reminded her of that night. Her skin prickled with the memory of fear.

  “Girl,” Lianna called from behind her. “I am tired of your presence. Remove yourself, or I will have you thrown back onto the street.”

  She pointed to the statue. “This is one of the Emperor’s shieldmen, isn’t it?”

  “What?” For a moment the woman sounded puzzled. “Oh, from the old tales of that warlock, Malessar? Ah, I see – you would link them into your wild story of the North rising again. You’re tenacious, I’ll give you that. As your heathen friend can undoubtedly tell you, my husband stands high in the Emperor’s esteem. The Emperor himself gifted him those statues for his services.”

  Cassia was too intent on the blunt, carved features of the statue to be impressed or intimidated, even by the looming presence of Lianna’s bodyguard. The man’s palm rested heavily upon the hilt of his short blade. She thought she could even smell the cold air of the North in this dark corner of the room.

  “And has he gifted them to others?”

  “No,” Lianna said. She sounded smug, Cassia decided.

  “Where are the other figures?”

  “I neither know nor care, girl.”

  Cassia shrugged and turned to Arca. The old man looked wary, and ready to bolt.

  “The temple of Manethrar,” he said quietly.

  Cassia stared at Rais. The prince’s mouth quirked upward, as though he knew what she was thinking. I don’t even need to get into the palace.

  She pulled the cloth-wrapped bundle from the small bag at her side, aware of Lianna’s attendants gathered in the doorways and the thuggish bodyguard now within arm’s reach. She hoped she could depend on Rais to fend them all off.

  The bundle held one of the miniature figures she had taken from Malessar’s dhar. An unpainted relative to the shieldman that stood before her. As she turned it in her hands it seemed to grow heavier.

  Now what? I’m no warlock – how do I do this?

  “Shieldmen of the Empire,” she said aloud. Her voice echoed with the power of the North, and she had no conscious idea where the words had come from. “This is your time. I command you – wake to your duty.”

  “That’s enough,” Lianna said. “Remove them all, Terrik. Your friend is as insane as you are, Arca. I should never have let you in.”

  One of Lianna’s attendants grabbed Cassia’s arm; more crowded in behind her. She heard Rais close by her shoulder, cursing as he wrestled against the bodyguard’s weight. The figurine in Cassia’s hands was warm and heavy. She held it close to her chest to keep it from being knocked from her grasp.

  “Unhand me!” Rais snapped. There was a smack. A thump. Somebody tried to drag Cassia back.

  Another thud. This time the floor vibrated under Cassia’s feet. She looked up.

  The shieldman had moved.

  As she watched, it moved again, and brought the other foot down from the pedestal. Tiles cracked beneath its weight.

  Nothing she had seen during her time with Baum and Malessar could have prepared her for such an unnerving sight. Not Craw’s lethal grace, nor the soul-eating mists of Karakhel. The stone itself flexed as it was never intended to – stone shaped into human form, forced to be something it was not. The shieldman moved as though it was in pain.

  And it was not alone. Wrenched about by Lianna’s attendants, Cassia caught sight of the statues that occupied the other corners of the room. They were all in the process of climbing down from their plinths, their movements perfectly synchronised.

  “Sorcery!” the bodyguard, Terrik, cried out. He backed away, blood leaking from one nostril. He had clearly underestimated the prince. “Protect the Lady Lianna!”

  The tide of the struggle altered abruptly. Now Lianna’s attendants retreated with shouts of fear and confusion. Rais helped one on his way with a well-aimed cuff across the ear; the prince did not appear to have noticed the shieldmen yet. Cassia clutched the figurine close to her chest and skipped back into space to give the newly-wakened shieldman more room.

  Lianna’s shout was a rising note of alarm that suddenly became a cry of agony. Cassia saw her with her head thrown forward, clutching at her stomach, and she guessed Lianna’s waters had broken. For a moment she considered staying to help the woman, but she knew the North would not wait. Instead she turned to confront Terrik, who had been batted aside by other attendants and a woman who could only be the house’s midwife.

  “Tell the Lady Lianna,” she said, in a cold voice that cut through the clamour now echoing through the room, “that if she wishes her son to live in freedom and peace, then the Emperor must defend against the risen powers of the North. And he must do it now.”

  The shieldmen lumbered towards her from the corners of the room, already seeming to march in step. It was a compelling, chilling sight. There was a lack of humanity in these figures that drove a shaft of fear along Cassia’s spine. And I will gather an army of these things around me, she thought. I hope I’m not making a mistake.

  The nearest of the four shieldmen halted at her shoulder; she sensed the sheer weight of its presence. She glanced across at Rais and saw the prince regarding her warily, breathing hard and rubbing the knuckles of one hand. Even Craw had not disconcerted him this much.

  “To Manethrar’s temple,” Cassia said.

  Rais hesitated, then nodded. His smile was a thin mask. “I thought you might suggest as much. This should prove entertaining.”

  They marched in absolute silence, but for the heavy thump of stone upon stone. Cassia could not look over her shoulder at them – at their blank, chiselled features, sightless and pitiless – without thinking of Meredith. He was stone, just like them, yet he had been more than that. She was sure of it. At the end, he had wanted to spare her this terrible weight. He would have willingly failed in his task to save her from her own part in Baum’s scheme. He had, Cassia thought bitterly, been far more human than his creator and master.

  These shieldmen, on the other hand . . . they were rougher creatures than Meredith had been. Built for a single purpose: to go to war. They showed no sign that they heard her orders, and they neither spoke to nor acknowledged anybody else. Rais and Arca were as inconsequential to them as the shieldmen themselves were inhuman. It was not difficult to see how their mere presence as dormant statues in a far-off border shrine would have dissuaded enemies from attacking the fledgling Empire.

  And this Emperor, centuries later, had handed them out as gifts to his favoured inner circle. Over-sized trinkets. Cassia shook her head at the idea.

  The shieldmen marched in two ranks along the middle of the street as Cassia led them down into the temple districts. Several times, as they had passed streets she recognised, or narrow, high-sided alleys that divided the houses and, further down the hill, the tenements, she considered ducking away and fleeing from them. From everything. Casting Malessar’s figurines and her sword aside for others to take up. But she suspected it wou
ld not be so easy, and that the act of waking the shieldmen had somehow bonded them to her. They would find her out if she attempted to leave them behind. She might escape them for a while, at least, but one day she would turn a corner, or look over her shoulder, and the stone ranks would be gathered there, waiting for her. Their presence behind her now impelled her through the city, just as the drumbeat in her blood compelled her northwards.

  Their passage back through the city had also gained the attention of several dozen Helleans. That was little surprise; the four shieldmen, living stone and larger than life, were hardly inconspicuous. Most of the people were content to remain well beyond arm’s reach. They peered out from doorways and windows, and gathered at the mouths of the alleyways. Cassia heard snatches of conversation, questions thrown out that she had no intention of answering. Apprehension, fear and marvelling, and a whispered undercurrent that spread as a wave before them – witchcraft. Sorcery. There was a warlock in Hellea. Cassia almost laughed when she heard that.

  A few children, ever curious and unmindful of their own safety, dared to dart out in front of the shieldmen or fall in alongside and mimic their stiff, deliberate gait. The ancient stone figures ignored them as they must have ignored everything else over the past centuries. The children skipped around Arca’s mule too, laughing at his feeble attempts to bat them away. They steered away from Rais however, and Cassia herself – Rais was the imperious Galliarcan once more, glaring and smiling fiercely as though he would not hesitate to abduct any child slow enough to stay in his path, while Cassia thought she must look as stern and dangerous as one of the High Kings of old, blades belted firmly at her hips, despite the fact that the cloak over her shoulders bore a storyteller’s patches.

  I am the story now, not the storyteller. A curiously painful admission to have to make. She did not want to explore it further.

  By the time they gained the temple districts once more, news of their passage must have spread like fire through the rest of the city. Crowds were drawing into the squares, lining the steps of every temple, forcing the prostitutes from their places. Scuffles broke out, yet there was no sign of the city watchmen, nor the priests who would still inhabit the temples even at this late hour. Significantly, smoke rose from none of the temples; no prayers were being said, no sacrifices were being made. Not even in Saihra’s temple. The entire Hellean pantheon had paused mid-breath.

  Rais drew close to her. So far he had resisted pulling his sword, but his hand firmly gripped the hilt. The prince was ready to fight.

  “How many of these damned things are in that temple?”

  Cassia looked at the building and shrugged. Manethrar’s temple dwarfed the others in this square. Of course some fraction of the floorspace would be devoted to altars, open colonnades, offices, quarters for the priests themselves and storage rooms for the temple’s relics and riches. But Malessar’s shieldmen did not require quarters or food, nor did they need space to study or exercise. If each one stood erect upon a plinth, as they had in the shrine on the western border, with enough space between them for a man to walk comfortably . . .

  “Some hundreds?”

  Rais swore beneath his breath. “Girl, these people will panic. You will start a riot.”

  “Or I will convince the Emperor that I am serious.”

  Rais stared at her and his eyes narrowed. “Is that what all this is about? A grand gesture?”

  “Hardly,” Cassia said. “I need an army that can fight against Caenthell’s spirits.” She indicated the paired ranks behind them. “I think they can.”

  “Your idea.” Rais exhaled. “Gods help us.”

  They had reached the foot of the temple steps. Cassia paused there. “Stay here with Arca, Rais. I don’t want him to be lost in the crowd.”

  The old soldier leaned over his mule’s neck and spat onto the ground. He looked so frail and exhausted Cassia was surprised he had managed the journey back down the hill without falling off.

  Rais looked around and then shook his head. He started up the steps ahead of her, his sword rasping clear of its scabbard. “No, Cassia. Give your orders to the stone men, not to me.”

  She bridled, but it appeared she had no choice in the matter. One raised hand stopped the shieldmen on the first step, where they would tower over anyone who dared approach, and then she followed the prince. “Looking after your interests, Rais?”

  “No, Cassia,” he said again, in that patronising manner that infuriated her so much. “I’m looking after your interests.”

  He gestured with his blade and Cassia looked up to see a small crowd starting to gather on the temple’s portico. Priests, she realised, and armed with staffs. They had clearly come to deny her entrance. She could not blame them.

  The lead priest – an elderly man with white hair wisping down around his shoulders – came down two steps and thumped the base of his staff against the stones. “You dare to profane this place with heathen blood?” he shouted down.

  “Would you prefer it was your blood?” Rais snapped back.

  Cassia fought the temptation to thump him. She pushed ahead of him, her calves and thighs complaining at the extra effort. “Will you refuse entry to me?” she asked, making certain her tone suggested that would not be a good idea.

  The priest stared down his nose at her. “I have authority granted to me by the Emperor himself to refuse entry to any who would damage this temple.”

  “And you include me in that category?”

  The priest’s eyes flickered as he glanced past her: to the shieldmen at the base of the steps. He recognised them, that was beyond doubt. Perhaps he had supervised their removal to the Lady Lianna’s house. Cassia wondered how much of the man’s anger was a cover for the fear coursing through him. If these four statues could be brought to life, then what of the others that remained in the temple? And if the old man knew the true story of their construction – if that tale had been passed down through the centuries – then he must also know why Malessar had built them. What they stood guard against.

  “You will not enter,” the priest said. “I cannot allow it. This is foul sorcery.”

  Cassia shrugged. “It is sorcery, but I do not have time to argue the point with you.”

  She unwrapped the stone figurine again and held it up above her head. “Shieldmen of the Empire, I command you – wake to your duty!”

  Those words had worked once, and she hoped they would do so again. The figurine was suddenly appallingly heavy in her hand and she lowered it quickly before it could unbalance her.

  For a long moment the only sound was the murmuring of the crowd gathered in the square behind her. She thought she could hear the echo of hooves upon stones and cobbles and, somewhere in the distance, the shouts of soldiers forming into ranks. By now the palace must have been warned. The Emperor would think there was an insurrection.

  Even the drums had fallen silent. The awful, insistent heartbeat of the North that had been her unwelcome companion since the moment she first grasped the hilt of Malessar’s sword was gone – as though the land itself waited for something to happen.

  Rais breathed hard at her side, his shoulders set to charge up the steps at the priests who guarded the portico. The air felt thick, pushing against her, forcing her to lean forward to maintain her balance.

  A thin, hard smile formed on the priest’s features. “Leave this place,” he said. “If you run fast enough you may even avoid having your tongue cut out and fed to the waters for your blasphemy.”

  Something was happening. It had to be. This feeling, these ripples of pressure that flooded down the steps from the temple – they had to mean something.

  A shout from inside the temple: a warning inflected with fear. It was echoed immediately by another, higher pitched, more frantic. And then a booming sound, reverberating across the entire square. The sound of someone striking a ceremonial drum, to call the city’s worshippers to prayer. But this call seemed heavier – less than human, somehow.

  The
priest’s smile shattered, the blood drained so completely from his face that his skin matched the colour of his hair. The line of priests across the portico wavered. And then it just fell apart. Men scattered, ducking back into the shadows of the portico, using the great pillars as cover, and fleeing headlong down the steps, tripping over each other.

  A figure marched into the light, in strict time to the beat of the drum from within. The stiff-legged gait, the inflexibility of the figure’s hips, the way it towered other every other man on the portico . . . all unmistakeable. A shieldman. And there were others behind it, Cassia saw.

  Even having witnessed the awakening of the four shieldmen at Lianna’s house, she found she was completely unprepared for what followed. There seemed no end to the lines that marched out of Manathrar’s temple and onto the steps. They shook the air and the earth, and there were cracks in the stone steps that had not been there before. Like silent, stone-patient worshippers the shieldmen formed ranks upon the steps until the front of the temple was virtually hidden from view. She tried to estimate their number, but her count failed after fifty.

  “Kolus’s teeth,” Rais breathed softly. “There are so many of them . . .”

  Cassia had the same thought. How had Malessar created such a force? He could not have sculpted each statue himself; even for a near-immortal warlock that would test the bounds of endurance. He would be carving the stone even now, she thought. And the sorcery involved in his efforts . . . surely it would have incapacitated him for a whole season or more!

  “So many,” she agreed. The drumbeat of the North had started up again, in counterpoint to the mustering drum of the shieldmen. Cassia’s soul felt battered by the strength of the conflicting rhythms and she wondered how much longer she might be able to bear such forces in her body.

  I am not Malessar – I am no warlock. Nor am I a hero of the Age of Talons.

  Be as Pelicos, a voice whispered into her mind. Malessar’s dry tones – and those of Sah Ulma, the captain of the Rabbit. And the cracked old priest Dorias, and Narjess, and Leili. And the smooth, beguiling purr of Craw’s voice. Be as Pelicos.