by Steven Poore
Arca grunted. “Like Baum.”
She waved them to silence as they approached the walls of the town. Sure enough, there were at least half a dozen nocked bows above the gate, with more on either side of the polearms that had been pitched out from the barricade itself, to make certain the intruders kept their distance. Townsfolk peered out at them as though they had been under siege for a month or more.
“We need passage and supplies,” Cassia called into the town. She thought she heard muttering behind the barricade, but there was no other response. She let the silence hang for a long, uncomfortable moment before calling out again.
This time there was movement. A man pushed his way – or was pushed by others, perhaps – to the front of the small crowd. “Who are you?”
“Cassia, of Kes – ” she broke off to correct herself. “Cassia, of Caenthell and the North.”
More muttering. Then the town’s spokesman shouted back. “This is a poor town. We have nothing you need. Leave us be.”
Another voice broke in, over him. “We are sworn to Hellea! Hellea and Lord Asriak! Leave while you can!”
Rais laughed aloud. “You think we came to invade your muddy village, idiot? We’d have come from the other direction if that were the case!”
“Rais . . .” Cassia said in warning. She faced the gateway again. “I defend the Empire. There is war coming, from the North. The Emperor sends an army there.” It was only partly a lie, she thought.
“Led by a girl?”
“Where are your banners?”
“I have none!” she shouted. At her side, Rais shook his head and sighed.
There were shouts from inside the town to drive the invaders away. The men atop the gates drew back their bows. The drums pounded at Cassia’s temples and she fought to resist the tide of anger that rose within her. The power of the North would only serve to hasten the bloodshed.
She glanced across at Arca. The old man hunched in his saddle as though hoping to remain unnoticed. But there was tension in his shoulders, and the bones of his knuckles gleamed white beneath his skin. He sat in wait, expecting the storm and the missiles that the townsfolk readied. Yet intuition told her there was more to it than that.
The Winter Road . . .
“Lord Asriak,” she muttered, half to herself. Arca’s neck twitched.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Rais said. “Perhaps we should go around . . .”
Cassia shook her head. “We need fresh food. More than that – I need an army. Not just these shieldmen.” She turned back and raised her voice. “Your loyalty does you credit. I have no banners because my captain owns no banners. He is as poor as all of you, yet he rides to battle in the North. And once, both this town and Lord Asriak bowed to him and gave him a name. Would you do less than that now?”
The prince looked puzzled. “I have never been here before . . .”
“Not you,” Cassia hissed through her teeth.
His eyes widened. “Him?”
“Our captain is Arca the Brave,” Cassia shouted to the gates. “Will you not pay your respects?”
At the corner of her vision she saw the old man slowly raise his head. He exhaled heavily, as though he had found himself on a road that led only over the edge of a sheer cliff. She knew that feeling herself, Cassia thought, with little sympathy for the man. She knew it all too well.
“Arca the Brave, who saved the life of Lianna of the Castaria in a savage battle against overwhelming odds. Arca the Brave, who was owed a debt of gratitude by your people. Arca the Brave, who rides North into battle once more alongside the Emperor’s shieldmen!”
She paused to draw breath, and realised that the town had also fallen silent. An unworldly pressure sat on her shoulders – the weight of her mission, of the prospect of failure, of the power of a history measured against the reality of itself. The exhalations of the gods, perhaps. If warlocks such as Malessar felt this pressure all of the time, then Cassia considered it far too high a price to pay for the sake of magic and near-immortality. No wonder it had driven Baum to the brink of insanity.
And did that fate await her too? Would she even know it if it did?
Madness beckoned her along that perilous, dark road. She dug her fingernails deep into the palms of her hands and pulled herself back to the present. The drums taunted her, but they also kept her from thinking too much. They made her decisions instinctive – a kind of primal intuition that she had started to think was inherited from her distant forefathers in Caenthell. So far they had not let her down.
At least, she believed they had not.
Men pulled the makeshift barricades aside to allow a small delegation out onto the road. The town’s elders, Cassia guessed: men high in Lord Asriak’s favour. This was where her gambit would stand or fall.
Rais’s hand rested upon the hilt of his sword, but the blade remained sheathed as he allowed the men to approach. For a moment Cassia considered dismounting, but then she decided to keep the advantage of her height in the saddle.
The first man wore the robes of a priest of Saihri and his hands looked oiled and soft. A man long used to his comforts. He took in the three riders with a carefully masked expression, but the tone of his voice betrayed his fear. “I recognise the shieldmen you bring with you, Cassia of Caenthell. My lady. I wish I did not. But . . . Arca the Brave? I scarcely recognise you at all.”
It was not surprising. The Arca who had fought to save Lianna was a different man – a man long dead, drowned in ale, wine and self-loathing. But she needed that man. He had to live again.
The look Arca gave her was filled with resignation. And dread. He knew the role he must play. “Will you make me do this?”
Cassia nodded without hesitation.
Arca lifted his shirt over his head. His movements were slow, stiffened by age and old injuries. His torso was discoloured with bruises accrued over the last weeks, and the bones of his ribs and his arms showed plainly through his skin. But these were not the reason for the Saihran priest’s indrawn breath. The scars that lined Arca’s chest and shoulders – and there were more yet, Cassia realised, across the old man’s back – were the wounds that he had accumulated over his career as a soldier. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had been fortunate enough to never lose a limb. Instead he had been hacked at and pierced so often that he should have been dead several times over.
His shirt hanging loose from one hand, Arca raised the other to trace a scar that ran beneath his left ribs. “This one . . . I think. This is the one. You cleaned it and bound it. I couldn’t breathe. Still can’t, sometimes. And . . . this one. They nearly gutted me.”
“They should have gutted you,” the priest said quietly. “It would have saved me the trouble of saving you.”
Arca reached around with difficulty to feel at his back. “And here. Where the bastards stuck me with arrows before they ran off. Still hurts. Every damned day.”
“You should have died.” There was no animosity in the priest’s words. It was a simple statement of fact.
The regret and anger belonged to Arca instead. “I wanted to. You would not let me.”
The priest shook his head. “Saihri kept your life, not I. I have often wondered why.”
He turned his attention back to Cassia and again she found it difficult to read his expression. He seemed too young to have been one of Arca’s companions in the Kebrian campaigns, but like most priests he sounded an educated man. The words between them spoke of a deeper, older relationship than she would first have thought.
History, again.
“The gods are cruel to those whose prayers they answer,” the priest said. “Even Saihri’s healing has a price. Come and tell me how this town must pay.”
10
Arca would not speak to her. Since they had left the small town of Aemwell, he had not even come near her. Cassia saw him, nonetheless – brief glimpses as they marched along what in these parts was still called the Winter Road. He still huddled in his saddle, whe
n he was mounted, an exhausted old man resigned to his fate, but more often he sat or lay in the bed of the cart they had brought from Aemwell. Quiet, introspective, answering the questions men put to him with barely more than a nod or a shake of his head. Cassia had slowed her pace once to ride alongside the cart, but Ultess steered her away before she reached it.
“Leave him alone,” the innkeeper said. It was half a warning, half a plea. “Haven’t you done enough already?”
She stared at him and, though he ducked his head to avoid direct eye contact, he would not move aside.
“You are a good friend to him, Ultess,” she said at last. “If it makes any difference to you, I did not want this. But I did not have a choice. Baum wrote Arca’s part in this story years ago. Mine was written even before that.”
“This is not a story, girl,” Ultess said. His brow creased into a disapproving frown.
“All of history is a story,” Rais announced from over Cassia’s shoulder. He had followed her back from the van of the column, and now spoke in the light tone that he had to know irritated the innkeeper. “It is only that we do not know how it began. A scholar of the North taught me that.”
“Karak,” Cassia guessed.
“Of course. If we are lucky, sir, then this tale will live on long after we are dead, and we will all be immortal.” Rais flashed an easy smile to match his provocative words.
Ultess’s face darkened further. “And if we all die in the process, who will tell this damned tale of yours? Unless, like all Galliarcans, you intend to run on the eve of battle.”
Rais’s smile hardened. “You will run before I do.”
Cassia felt the rhythm of battle building behind their words. The drums of the North thudded accompaniment in her mind, and she tightened her grip on the horse’s reins. She wanted to travel at such a pace, to hasten their journey up the Emperor’s March. It would be so easy to kick her heels into the horse’s flanks and leave her squabbling companions behind . . . if it were not for the fact that her heart told her she would need them all at her side before the end.
There were now three distinct components to the force she led across the fields of Hellea, ever northwards towards the dark pressure that spilled out of Caenthell. Cloud blotted the horizon, as it had done when she witnessed it from Craw’s back. To be visible from here, on the ground, it must have grown with unearthly speed.
If it was visible to her, then it was also visible to the soldiers. So far none of them had deserted, but Cassia would not blame any who did.
The men numbered around three hundred already, after they had visited only two Hellean towns. Though the campaigning season was over and the harvests had been gathered in, many men had not yet returned home from the closest of the Emperor’s legions, and many more would be wintering in foreign lands. So Cassia’s recruits were a motley collection of green young men and weathered craftsmen. A few were old enough to have retired from the legions and still possessed helmets, greaves and, in some cases, battered breastplates that might once have belonged to an enemy. Most carried polearms and light bows, while others had bundles of javelins along with short knives.
The core of them came from Aemwell, where the name and reputation of Arca the Brave had been the attraction Cassia hoped for. Arca’s lone stand against the mercenaries who sought to kidnap Lianna of the Castaria was the subject of many local stories and songs even if, as Cassia suspected, they did not approach the true history of that fight. His arrival at the town’s gates made her task all the easier. The chance of riding into battle with Arca the Brave, of being a soldier of the resurrected Guhl’s Company, was an irresistible lure to Aemwell’s veterans and youngsters alike. They would follow in the footsteps of their elder siblings or their fathers, or they would relive the glories of their earlier careers. They left their homes with a spring in their step, joking, laughing and singing as they marched in rough ranks behind their newly appointed captain.
Their reluctant new captain, Cassia reminded herself. The weight of responsibility bore down hard on Arca’s shoulders, and he would not forgive her for it.
They were at the tail of her column, while the other new element of her force led the way and scouted the road ahead. If there was one thing she had never imagined, it was that she might have units of cavalry to command. Forty or more horsemen, in fact, gathered together from the estates they had passed since leaving Aemwell, as well as from the young sons of the richer merchants of the town of Tertissia. What they lacked in experience they certainly made up for with enthusiasm, proud in their saddles with their fathers’ swords at their sides.
She suspected that they would have fought amongst themselves for the rank of captain, and so there was only one man she could name to their command. Rais took to his role with obvious pleasure, barking orders as he would have done back in Galliarca. If any of the young firebrands resented his position, they were far more impressed by his pedigree.
That left the meat of the army – the shieldmen. As silent as ever, marching in strict formation, they paid no attention to what went on around them. They followed Cassia’s orders unquestioningly. When Ultess led the other foot soldiers in drills, the shieldmen merely stood in their ranks, exactly where they had halted. They did not eat, neither did they sleep. The other men regarded them with suspicion and awe, for the first few days at least, until it became clear the shieldmen would not turn on them as they slept.
If Arca had acted, however reluctantly, as the banner that the townsfolk gathered around, then the shieldmen were the lure that drew them onwards. A sorcerous force carved from solid stone, set to guard the Empire against invasion – the stories were far better known down here than they were back in the North, even if people had never really believed them. But now . . . now, it was as if the Age of Talons had come again.
Cassia shrank inside herself and shivered every time the men launched into song, or when she heard another soldier invoke the name of one of the old heroes. Just as Rais did, her army seemed to believe that victory, and with it their place in history, was assured. That with the warlock’s shieldmen alongside them, they were favoured by the gods.
Cassia wanted to tell them otherwise – to dismiss them all and send them home before it was too late. Every glance at the blackening horizon told her just how much power the resurrected High King of Caenthell possessed. Her small force would be melted away like snow falling on a campfire. Yet she was committed to this course now and, truth be told, she needed their support. The very presence of the unblooded soldiers helped to anchor her humanity. Without them, surrounded only by unspeaking stone, she was certain she would go mad.
And now she had more shieldmen too.
The shrine was much the same as the one where she had first encountered the great stone warriors. It did not take much for her to imagine Meredith’s voice, over-loud in the claustrophobic gloom. Rais was unnervingly close behind her and the warmth of his breath caused her skin to tingle. It was not unpleasant, but she pushed the distraction firmly to the back of her mind.
“Twenty four of them,” the prince muttered. His voice was pitched low, as though he feared to wake them himself.
Again Cassia was struck by the scale of the work that must have been involved. How on earth could Malessar have created and distributed such a large number of shieldmen throughout the Empire without assistance? And why was that aid not recorded, somewhere in tales or in written histories?
Archives . . . that was the answer, perhaps. Malessar must have removed documents from libraries across the known world, removing himself from history at the same time. All to preserve his own privacy. To turn the shieldmen into a weapon that nobody else could use unless they possessed the statuettes that brought them to life.
Cassia unwrapped the figure she had brought with her. It was an exact scale replica of the shieldmen enclosed within this shrine – from their bowed, helmeted heads to the spears each figure clutched in one hand. The stone was warm to touch. Warmer than it had any right to b
e, she thought, watching trails of her own breath curl into the air.
A few of the prince’s riders, those he had counted as his officers – or, at least, those who were as adventurous or foolhardy as he was – waited at the shrine’s entrance. They peered in with undisguised curiosity, their voices echoing between the stone columns. Cassia wondered how quickly they might flee once they saw the shieldmen begin to move.
“Will it be enough?”
She glanced back over her shoulder. Rais was an interloper here, out of place amongst the heavy shapes of Hellean architecture. He looked tense, poised like a startled cat, his sword drawn and loose in one hand, despite the fact that he had already witnessed such an awakening.
“Enough to counter whole centuries of black fury? I doubt it,” she said. “But perhaps enough to resist. To delay. Have you asked if there are more shrines along the Emperor’s March?”
It frustrated her a little that Baum had taken such a circuitous route from the North to Hellea in the first place. It meant the length of the March was a blank space to her, and the only sure sign she would have of their progress was the gradual rise of the distant horizon. That, and the black shroud of Caenthell’s evil that would inevitably gather above them like a storm that refused to burst.
“Nathos says there are two. Tualin says three.” He lifted one shoulder. “Perhaps. But even so, only another three-score of these things to strengthen your force.”
“You’re trying to dissuade me again,” Cassia said.
“Of course. I have my own interests to protect, after all. Listen Cassia, I am only trying to help. To be the voice of reason.”
She almost smiled. “It is too late for that, sir.”
Cassia concentrated on the figurine she held, letting the heat from it seep into her own flesh. Malessar’s sorcery strained at its bounds. It had strained against the curse wards he set to contain it at Caenthell, and now, just an arm’s length from another of the shieldmen the warlock had created, it struggled for release once more. These figurines had been hidden for decades – centuries even – on the far side of the ocean, yet the magic bound within them still burned to be free. It would have happened sooner or later, she realised; if not because of her, then somebody else. Magic could be harnessed, but it could not be bound forever. If Malessar had known that, he had also forgotten it.