The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  Perhaps it was best that it happened now, before the evil festering behind the curse wards grew too powerful for any sort of sorcery to combat.

  The sound reminded her of a grindstone. Dust tumbled from the shieldman’s arms, as flour might fall away from the edges of the mill. Rais’s young adjutants swore and muttered protective prayers. If they needed any other proof of her cause at all, then this would bind them to it.

  Cassia took a step back as the first shieldman lifted one arm. It pressed its hand to its breastplate as though making a salute, and bent to step from the plinth. The rest of the cohort, dimly visible in the light that filtered through the entrance, were also beginning to move.

  “Form ranks outside,” Cassia told the first soldier. “We march North.”

  Its head ground and it turned its face, immobile and distant, to regard her. Cassia felt her heart hammer along with the drums. For a long moment she thought the stone man would refuse her. Her mind shrank in terror at the consequences of that.

  It nodded then, and jabbed the spears it held into the air. A silent rallying call: the remainder of the cohort copied the action, stepping onto the flagstones and kicking up dust that had lain undisturbed for whole centuries.

  “I shall see this in my dreams tonight,” Rais complained. He ducked a shoulder and moved nimbly aside to allow the cohort’s commander to pass. “That is, if I sleep at all.”

  Cassia ignored his flippancy. He did not have to face her dreams, after all. They had not improved since that night before Aemwell. Nightmares of a crumbling land, trapped in the jaws of some unfathomable beast. She wondered if they were prescient, or merely visions sent by Caenthell’s spirits to frighten her. Either way, they exhausted her further and she did not want to admit that to Rais.

  She waited for the cohort to pass through before following them from the shrine. Rais waited with her, thankfully in silence, a small square of cloth held over his nose to shield him from the swirling dust. Cassia let the dry taste of past centuries slip into her nostrils and lie upon her tongue. It was a bitter taste that Baum and Malessar must have shared. Loss and regret. How much would she come to regret before this was all played out?

  The prince nudged her, and pointed into the darkness at the rear of the shrine. He summoned a torch from one of his new adjutants and she followed him, curious despite herself. The torch further dirtied the air with smoke, light flickering from the ancient columns and the emptied plinths.

  “Something moved,” Rais said. There was an edge of tension in his voice. His sword flicked into a guard position. “I’m certain of it.”

  Cassia felt that tension cross to her own body. She clutched the stone figurine close. It was still warm, though like the others she had used the heat dissipated quickly after the shieldmen were awoken. She wished it was a little less unwieldy. If she could free up one hand she could draw her own sword.

  “Stay behind me.”

  “Is that an order?” she asked, exasperated.

  “If need be, Cassia.”

  Protecting his interests, of course. Damn the man.

  Rais swept the torch before him, quartering the shadows. Cassia waited by one of the plinths, unable to work out what he was searching for. Rais stiffened, lifted the torch higher, and then breathed out. “Kolus’s blood . . .”

  Cassia could not stay back. “What is it?”

  She shouldered him aside, and after a moment of resistance he allowed her past. He moved the torch to better illuminate the scene.

  There was another plinth here – or, rather, it had once been here. The stone was cracked and split asunder and Cassia could see the chipped gashes where chisels and wedges had been driven in. Then the halves had been pulled apart to reveal a hole in the ground, a hidden cellar beneath the shrine itself.

  But there was more yet. A stone figure had once stood on this plinth. A shieldman, like the rest of the cohort. Now it lay in pieces, limbs knocked from its torso, fingers broken away and crushed into rubble and dust. The figure must once have possessed a head, but Cassia could not see that anywhere. The vandals, whoever they were, had destroyed the shieldman in order to gain clear access to the plinth.

  She looked down upon it and shivered. Then the blood froze in her veins.

  The dismembered shieldman’s chest still moved. It breathed.

  Something scratched at her ankle. A stone forearm, smashed away just below the elbow. The index and ring fingers were stumps; the remaining digits flexed against the ground like salted stone slugs.

  She could not contain herself. Even after all she had witnessed in the last months, this was too much. She ran from the shrine, Rais’s shout echoing in her ears.

  “It stopped moving, after a while,” Rais said. He offered her one of the small bowls he had brought over to her camp, but Cassia shook her head. She was hungry, but she could not face the prospect of food. The prince shrugged and sat down.

  “It would not have felt anything, Cassia. It was not alive.”

  She had to concentrate to form the words she needed. The drums wanted to pound her thoughts into oblivion, and she wanted to let it happen. “How do you know?”

  “How do I know what? That it was not alive? It was made of stone, Cassia. Stone things do not live.”

  She knew otherwise. Meredith had lived. Before he was returned to stone.

  The prince used a hunk of bread to mop up the stew. He seemed more bothered by the quality of the food than her own condition.

  “You don’t want to know what was down there?” Rais asked after a while.

  Cassia could not bring herself to care one way or the other. She had preferred the silence.

  “Nothing.” Rais answered his own question. “Just as one would expect after a place has been broken open by robbers. There was a small space beneath the plinth, barely enough to move in. I could not hold the torch there for long, as the smoke would have choked me, but the space seemed to be another shrine. A place for relics, perhaps. If so, the caskets that held them were smashed and looted centuries ago. Perhaps they would have been a clue as to how your shieldmen were originally created. I shall have to ask Malessar when we return to Galliarca.”

  “You make it seem a certainty,” Cassia said.

  “I have to believe it is so,” Rais replied. “Listen, Cassia. So much of this affair is beyond my understanding. Sorcery, dragons, stone men that march to war . . . if the responsibility was mine alone then I would not be able to move one foot in front of the other for fear that I was doing wrong. So I laugh. I don’t take things as seriously as I should. I admire your strength of will, Cassia. Your determination. But you cannot carry the weight of the entire world upon your shoulders. Not in this way. Let things go. Let the gods take the weight.”

  Cassia shook her head. “It isn’t that easy, Rais. Not here – not inside my head.”

  “Then let other people help. You brought us here with you, Cassia. I am a prince of Galliarca, not a decorative figurehead.”

  She stared at him for a moment and then laughed. The image of Rais’s head and torso, carved and painted, flying proud at the prow of a ship like the Rabbit, was difficult to dispel once it had taken root. And although laughter would not solve the problems she faced – had caused, in fact – Rais had a point. She had company. She did not have to do this alone.

  “All right,” she said at last. Rais had retreated behind a mask of affronted nobility, so she made an effort to control her giggles. He would not appreciate an explanation. “I will listen to suggestions.”

  Rais bowed his head. “My lady is magnanimous.”

  She picked up the other bowl. The stew, bulked out with whatever could be gleaned from the corners of fields and the few wild trees that still held their fruit, would taste far worse when it cooled. “Don’t push your luck too far.”

  “Of course not. I do have a question, though.”

  Cassia nodded for him to continue while she ate.

  “There may be another three of those shrines be
tween here and the North. What if more than one of the shieldmen have been vandalised in such a fashion?”

  Cassia took a moment to think about it. Rais’s question had been deliberately vague, she realised, but the meaning behind it was clear enough. Could she harden herself against the sight of dismembered limbs twitching upon the ground, reaching out for her and struggling to obey a summons to service even though they had been destroyed?

  “In truth . . . I don’t know,” she replied. “I didn’t believe they could suffer . . . but now I think I was wrong. And I don’t know if I have the right to call them to war.”

  “You are the Heir to the North,” Rais pointed out. “Of course you have the right. But do you need to enter each shrine in order to awaken them? Can you not just call them from outside?”

  Cassia opened her mouth to answer him and then paused. It was so simple that she had not even thought of it. “The temple in Hellea,” she said.

  “Exactly. You summoned them, and they came.”

  She nodded again. It made sense now he had said it. She had been much too focused on what she had to do to lift her head and see the easiest path forward.

  Rais lifted a finger. “But that is not all. Think, Cassia. Look at the evidence before you and ask yourself the question at the heart of it.”

  “Now you sound like Malessar,” she muttered. “Teaching lessons nobody understands.”

  “I am a prince. I was taught by the very best.”

  Including the warlock himself. “So what are you trying to teach me now?”

  Rais sat back, the self-satisfied smile Cassia detested quirking his lips.

  “I’m tired,” she said, and she allowed the very edge of the drumbeats to inflect her voice. “I am not in the mood for games, Rais. Simply tell me.”

  “I think you are doing this the wrong way,” he replied. “Tell me: if you were Malessar, and you had built these shieldmen and had them spread out in cohorts around the entire Hellean Empire, would you make it so that each cohort must be visited individually in order to activate it? Wouldn’t that be a most inefficient method of defending your borders against an enemy? It would take weeks – a whole season, perhaps – to make such a journey.”

  “Unless you travelled as we have done, on the back of a dragon,” Cassia said.

  “But my point still stands. Since we already know the shieldmen can be awoken from outside the confines of their posts, only one question remains. To what distance is this sorcery still effective?”

  It took a moment for her to understand the question, but then Cassia could do little more than stare at him.

  “If this was my Empire, I would want my army mobilised in one fell swoop. Not one squad at a time.” Rais tilted his head. “I’ll wager Malessar thought of that when he constructed these things.”

  Cassia wished she’d had the opportunity to ask the warlock exactly that, but at that point her plan had not even been half-formed.

  “You think I could wake all the remaining shieldmen from here?”

  “I don’t see why not. You have those figurines.”

  She dragged her bundle back to the campfire and unwrapped the small statues. This far she had been lucky, and none of the figures had been chipped or damaged during their journey. She suspected that if they were broken they would become as useless as any other shattered relic of the Age of Talons. The vandalised figures that stood in the temple in Lyriss came back to her mind, though they themselves had not been magical. Or at least, she did not think they were magical.

  Rais sat in silence while she positioned the stone figures before her. In Malessar’s house they had stood in three ranks, like a squad of soldiers marching to parade, or to battle. Now Cassia arranged them in a loose arc around the base of the fire, so their flat stone features flickered in the light. If she half-closed her eyes she could imagine that they lived, their chests rising and falling with the rhythm of their breathing.

  It was as though she had an audience again. She would stand or fall by this story. The miniature soldiers waited in silence for her to begin.

  The war drums beat restlessly at her temples to distract her. March North, they seemed to urge. Join with us.

  She thought of the words she had spoken back in Hellea – the way she had awoken the first four shieldmen. Those words felt inadequate now, unsuited to the occasion.

  “Hear me now,” she breathed. Rais leaned forward, straining to hear, but her words were not intended for him. “Hear me. Rise up and awake. I am Cassia of Keskor, blood of Caenthell and Heir to the North, defender of Hellea. I command you by right of possession and I call you to your appointed duties. Wake, assemble, and come to me. Let nothing stand in your way. You were born of the land. Now I call on you to defend that land. Rise up, and awake.”

  Nothing happened. The fire popped. In the distance, where Arca’s new company had set their own shelters, men shouted and laughed. The stone figures around the fire showed no sign that they had heard even one word.

  Aware of Rais’s gaze upon her, Cassia kept her own attention fixed upon the circle of figures. She willed them to carry her message to the shrines across the breadth of the land, her words to echo as whispers between the pillars and the plinths. The sorcery that Malessar had built into these small statues must be able to do such things.

  She heard Rais catch his breath. “Cassia . . .”

  His hand hovered uncertainly over the top of one of the figures and despite all of his schooling he could not prevent disbelief from entering his voice.

  Cassia reached out. Even before she touched the stone she felt the intense cold that radiated from it. Her fingers were numbed, drained of all sensation but the chill.

  “But I can feel the fire upon my face,” Rais marvelled. “Peleanna protect us!”

  Malessar’s sorcery came from the gods themselves, Cassia remembered. Which god had he turned to for this feat? She pressed her hand down upon the figure’s head.

  “Rise up and awake!”

  She could scarcely speak the words. Cold shot up her arm, freezing the flesh and driving waves of cramp into her chest. Her fingers were claw-like upon the stone, losing all colour. Something had bitten into her soul, sucking energy from her, remorselessly hungry. She lashed out with her free hand, intending to support herself – and found the next figurine instead. Now she could not even draw breath. Her lungs would not work.

  Rais was on his feet. “Cassia – let go of them!”

  She managed to shake her head. Sharp, shivering movements. She could not release them. This was a part of the sorcery. It had to be. She remembered how the ghostly soldiers of Karakhel had been strengthened when she threw her clothes onto the fire that Malessar had left. How the warlock himself had been weakened by manipulating the winds to carry the Rabbit across the ocean. If she wanted to summon the entire force of shieldmen to her side, then there must be a price. A personal cost.

  But to summon so many at once . . . the price could be too high. She realised she might have made a mistake.

  “Help me,” she gasped. That was the last breath she had in her body.

  Rais flung himself across the fire and tried to tear the figurines from her grip. He cursed in pain as his hands closed around her own. Heat flared for a moment, and then the sorcery was feeding from him too. She felt it – distant, ravenous . . . It was as though they were trying to fill a dried-up ocean.

  “Damn you, girl . . .” Rais ground out the words, his face pale. “You will kill us both!”

  Her chest spasmed and she almost choked on the fresh lungful of air that allowed her. “Your idea!”

  “I hardly need reminding. My heart is burning . . .”

  The drums. They pounded at her head. They mocked her, mocked her naivety and her stupidity. None of this would have happened if she had only let them in, embraced them, came home to them . . .

  No. No. I defy you. I will do this.

  She forced her jaw to form the words. Rise up and awake. Come to me.

&nbs
p; Another spasm – and at last her hands opened and the figurines dropped to the ground. Rais still held her, but in her numbness she could not feel him at all. Cassia took in a long, shuddering breath and closed her eyes.

  “Is it done?” he asked.

  “I think so. I hope so. I cannot do that again.” Her throat was raw and she felt sick. No amount of sleep would ever make this right. It was far worse than Karakhel had been.

  “Dear bloody gods above, Cassia – I never suggested you should awaken all of them at once! Singly or in pairs would have sufficed! You might have died if you had tried that alone!”

  Sensation returned slowly, just as it had on those winter nights when her father had managed to connive his way under someone’s roof and she did not face the prospect of freezing in the open air. But there was pressure on her wrists. Discomfort. Warm breath on her cheek.

  “You can release me now, Rais,” she said.

  The pressure eased. “Of course. If you are certain . . .”

  Cassia nodded. She pulled herself away. Sorcery was enough to cope with, without the prince complicating matters even further. “I need to rest.”

  Rais hesitated. “Cassia? Did it work?”

  “I don’t know. Really, I don’t know.” She was far too exhausted to deal with him. But without him, she might not have got this far. No – she knew she would not have made it this far. “Thank you, Rais.”

  He stood, then bowed to her. A prince of Galliarca, diplomatic and correct. “Until the morning, then. But if you need anything, Cassia . . .”

  She nodded again, staring at the figures that still stood around the fire until Rais had finally gone. Then she slumped down onto the hard ground and closed her eyes.