by Steven Poore
His touch was almost too welcome. It made her want to delay, to put off the journey until the next morning. But she knew if she did that, the same thing would happen the following day. And again after that. She sighed and lifted a hand to gently move his away.
“Rais. Please. You cannot sense it as I do. You can’t shield me from it, no matter how much you might wish to. I have to take responsibility for what I have done.”
“There’s a difference between taking responsibility for your actions and feeling guilt for what others have forced you to become.”
“Torcilides’s words?”
The prince shook his head. “My tutor, Karak. Malessar himself, remember.”
“He never followed his own advice either,” Cassia pointed out.
This time the smile was more rueful. “Of course. If there is nothing that will persuade you against this course of action, then all I can do is wish you well and pray for your success. May Peleanna strike your enemies to the ground, and may Kolus bury them beneath the earth.”
The sudden formality was awkward, and the pause that followed even more so. Cassia could not have said exactly why until she realised that each waited for the other to turn and leave, and that neither of them would turn away first.
She solved the issue by stepping in to kiss him on the lips, ducking away again before he could lift his hands to hold her there. His scent tickled her senses, and the warmth of his lips lingered upon her own. For once, Rais was left speechless before her.
“Until we meet on the March,” she told him. “Thank you, Rais. I could not do this without you.”
Once upon a time the road that led westwards into Lyriss had been wide and well maintained, by all the accounts Cassia had heard. Now, like the paths Baum had used to take her into the abandoned lands of Gethista, it was there only if she looked carefully for it. A waystone here, a fallen embankment there, the ground level where it should have followed the lay of the surrounding fields. It was not much to go on.
But while Gethista had disappeared so completely into history that it became a story that even Norrow had not known, men still lived and worked on these lands. Teams stood in the open fields and watched her pass, an unexpected distraction from the everyday tedium. The fact that the land was less peaceable this much closer to Lyriss was obvious: men held clubs and staffs as they guarded the carts half-filled with roots or bruised and under-sized fruit, and even the women who gathered the corn carried knives at their belts and stared at Cassia and her companions with deep suspicion. The sense of hostility was closer to what she remembered of the North too – not one of the folk she saw dared come within a long bow-shot of the road while she passed.
She supposed the shieldmen had something to do with that.
It was the original quartet, she was sure of it, the four she had awoken first in the Lady Lianna’s house. Unbidden and unexpected, they had followed her and Arca from the camp in silent formation. Surely Rais could not have ordered them to follow her, she thought. How would he have known to choose these four in particular? Yet they did not obey her when she told them to turn back, no matter how loud she shouted at them. All her imprecations rebounded from the stone forms just as the weather did. Arca meanwhile, the one man she had commanded to accompany her though it must surely be the last thing he wanted to do, looked on with dry amusement.
The four soldiers marched behind Cassia and Arca and their mounts, their endless endurance another reminder of the depths of the magic she now dealt with. When they halted to make camp the shieldmen stood unstinting guard, facing outwards, each with one hand resting upon the hilt of their great swords.
Arca watched them from the corners of his eyes while he ate, as though believing they might move against him if he did not. Cassia watched him in turn. The old soldier was still frail, a pale shadow of the man he had once been, and she worried that she was doing the wrong thing in bringing him on such an arduous journey. And the shieldmen . . . she was convinced that they watched her.
“I wonder what they think about,” Arca said, around a mouthful of the thin stew they had managed to cook on the third evening, after they exhausted the few supplies they had brought from the column. The farmers of these lands would not share their produce; they demanded payment in coin at what Cassia knew to be an extortionate rate, so she had made do with what she could scavenge from the sides of untended fields. Again, it was too much like her old life.
Cassia looked at the nearest of the shieldmen. Its broad shoulders had not moved in the last hour. Arca had said so little in the past few days he might as well have been one of them. He did not even talk to the voices of guilt Ultess said haunted him. It was a surprise to hear him break the silence that had grown between them.
“I hope they do not think of anything at all,” she said.
Arca made a sound that could have been surprise.
“They have already stood in silence for centuries,” she explained. “If they were aware of that then they must have wondered why they were created. How long it would be before they were summoned. What evil they must fight. I would not wish to spend so long thinking on that. And if they do think, then do they know what we do now? Do they think of their own deaths?”
Arca stared down into his bowl and shook his head. “Girl, you know how to kill a man’s hunger.”
“I’m sorry,” Cassia said. “I’m not good company. I could tell you a story though, if you wish. One of my father’s tales.”
He considered it. “Perhaps another time. When I am not so occupied with thoughts of my own mortality.”
This was a different Arca to the man she had first met in Hellea. Without the props of ale and wine he had regained some of the presence he must have possessed as a soldier. He appeared more awake, more alert, his shoulders straighter than they had been before. He still rasped when he breathed, shallow exhalations that combined with the faint shake of his hands showed how fragile his strength truly was. The other Arca, the decrepit wreck who lived at the Old Soak, had looked for his death, had come close to it once already. Now he was closer to life than he had been for years, Cassia thought, and still he was marching towards his death. Guilt made him march onwards. Guilt. Baum. Cassia herself.
Yet he was a soldier again. At last. In a company of soldiers.
“Tell me a story then,” she suggested. “Like before.”
Like before, though it would not be the same.
“A story – of what? Of that warlock? Hah. You know more of him now than I ever did. And of Baum too, I’ll warrant.”
“Then what about Guhl’s Company?”
Arca considered for a moment. Then he shook his head. “You mean of Dorias, more than Guhl or myself, or even Ultess. I am an old man, and a fool, but my mind is not so far gone as all that.”
He set the cooling remnants of his meal aside. “Dorias was a proud man. Proud and handsome. Guhl named him . . . now, what did he name him . . . ? Yes, that was it: the embodiment of the legion. Whatever that meant. The perfect soldier.” Arca glanced up at the shieldmen. “Not so perfect as them, or that Northern prince of yours. But when we crossed the Daedalians for the first time he marched in the van and we joked that the bloody Berdellans would scatter in fear of his physique and his manner. Even Baum was impressed by him.”
Cassia struggled to square this picture of the man with the bag of flesh and bone that haunted the temple in Lyriss. The years leeched health and colour from all men, but it had done far worse to Dorias’s body and mind.
“Was he in Kebria with you?” she asked.
Another shake of the head. “Not on our . . . misadventure. No. He would have stood out like a cock at a feast of eunuchs. And he disapproved. Or he said he disapproved. The thing is with Dorias, it was hard to tell exactly what he thought, and whether he meant what he said. He always meant what he did, but that’s a different matter. Some of the men called him The Dragon – he could be trusted as far as one of the damned beasts. The Age of Dorias – that’s what the
y called the drills he led. Like the Age of Talons, see?”
Cassia nodded. That part at least made more sense to her, given what she knew now. And what she thought she knew. “And Baum? What did he say?”
Arca frowned. His eyes darkened as he retreated into memories that must have been sealed away for half of his life or more. “He laughed. He said . . . that the Talons would have picked their teeth with his bones. At the time . . . at the time, we laughed too.”
He paused, looking around as though he expected to discover someone creeping up on him. “It doesn’t seem so funny now. Not here. Not in these days. Not with . . . them.”
And not knowing Baum’s own history, Cassia thought. She had some sympathy with Arca. It had come as a shock to her as well, to learn just how many of these old stories actually held truth. The shock had turned to anger, and that anger still burned inside her, driving her to the North, driving her to put right what Baum – and Cassia herself – had caused. She hoped Arca would feel the same.
She waited for a moment before asking her next question, so the muddied waters of his memories might become clear again. “What happened to him, Arca? How did he end up in Lyriss?”
Arca was silent for a while longer, until Cassia wondered if he would answer at all. At last he sighed. “He changed. Slowly, over time, as we campaigned in Berdella. He became less the perfect soldier. More unpredictable. Savage and without mercy. He was not always himself.”
Cassia remembered her own encounter with the man. The soldier had become a priest, in thrall to gods Baum claimed did not exist. Cassia suspected the truth lay between the lines – in another old story, of course.
“He went mad,” she prompted. “He heard voices.”
The old soldier nodded. “He believed all that Baum told him. When we took Gyre Carnus’s fort, Dorias was right at the front, with Baum and Attis. Even I was more cautious back then. Dorias was like one of those storms in the deserts south of Kebria. The wind howls and sand stings your flesh like a whip – and then suddenly it’s gone and the skies are clear again. Dorias was the same: his blade was a storm. My dragon, Baum named him after that. Bloodthirsty, insatiable . . . and doing the will of the voices he heard. Men shunned him. He didn’t notice, at first.”
Arca looked rueful. “He had never been the most popular man of Guhl’s Company, but now men chose to leave the campfire when he came to join them for meals. The drills he took were attended only reluctantly. Soldiers talked about him and mocked him in hushed tones behind his back. They said he argued with unseen spirits in the depths of night; once the argument turned to shouts and screams, and Ultess and two of the junior ranks had to force him to the ground and bind him for his own safety. And for the safety of his campmates.”
Cassia found it all too easy to imagine Dorias’s thin frame being beaten to the ground. She set her bowl aside, her appetite gone.
By that time, Arca told her, the legion was passing back into Hellea. Priests were brought from every village and temple along the route to examine the maddened soldier, but none could treat him; nor could they persuade the evil spirits to retreat from his mind. Dorias remained trussed, carried on the supply train amongst the wounded and the lame, babbling all the while that the gods spoke to him, spoke through him, admired him, promised him the benefits of all their wisdom and their riches . . .
And one night, someone let him loose. The ropes that bound him were found severed rather than untied – there could be no doubt that he had been set free. Despite Guhl’s best efforts, the identity of the man who helped him was never discovered. And none of them saw or heard from Dorias the soldier ever again.
“But that wasn’t the exact truth, was it?” Cassia asked.
Arca hesitated, then shook his head.
“You cut the ropes.”
Again the old soldier hesitated, but this time he nodded. “I did.”
It had been his turn to take food to The Dragon. Now the nickname was given more in derision than in honour. Dorias was nothing like any soldier’s vision of a dragon. He rarely acknowledged any man’s presence, instead maintaining one side of a conversation with strange guests that could neither be seen nor heard. The way Dorias focused upon something that was not there proved too disconcerting for many of the soldiers to handle; Arca found himself tasked to feed the man more often than anybody else.
“I . . . I sympathised with him,” he said. “He wasn’t the only man who heard voices. Sometimes, in the dead of night, when I drew the perimeter watch . . . I heard them too.” It had to be a difficult admission to make and Cassia waited quietly for him to continue. “Hard voices. Taunting. They sought to . . . unman me.”
“What did they say to you?”
The look he gave her, his eyes flashing up for a brief, uncomfortable moment, said much more than any words could have done. Arca the Brave was a construct, just as much as Meredith had been. A fake.
“They weren’t the same voices.” Arca evaded the question. “Not the ones that Dorias heard. They can’t have been. Mine never promised . . . no, not the same. Different. But still I sympathised,” he rallied, shaking one finger at Cassia to emphasise his words. “He did not deserve to be bound and thrown onto the back of a cart like so much garden produce. No soldier of the Emperor’s legions ever deserved such treatment.”
Cassia nodded her quiet agreement.
“I had to slap him to stop him struggling, so I could take my knife to the ropes without cutting into his flesh. For a short while I didn’t think he knew what I was doing. Or why. Then he relaxed, and I saw him watching me from the corner of his eye.”
The ropes parted and Arca eased back cautiously, aware he might be discovered at any moment. Much of the camp was quiet at this time of the evening, especially now the legion was back on home soil, but guards still patrolled between the lines of tents and makeshift shelters. If he was accused of interfering with the supplies, he would face branding and a brutal whipping.
Dorias lay still. Only the rise and fall of his shoulders betrayed his alert condition.
They said it would be you. His voice was a frayed whisper.
Who did? Who said?
My gods.
Which gods?
Arca shifted uneasily. His grip tightened on the haft of the knife. He half-expected Dorias to leap up at him. Blood would be spilled.
Not yours. Not tonight.
A chill crept up Arca’s spine. It was as if Dorias had heard his very thoughts. That could not be possible.
What gods? he repeated.
The dark hid Dorias’s smile. Come with me, he said. Come with me and find out.
Arca climbed down from the cart and backed away. Dorias still did not move. You’d better go.Get out of here.You won’t have much of a head start.
My gods will protect me.
Arca did not doubt that. He wondered if he had done the right thing, but it was far too late to change his mind. He watched, his shoulders tense, as Dorias pushed himself over the side of the cart. He moved with a supple ease that a man who had been tied day and night for the past week ought not to possess.
Dorias was gone in an instant, disappearing between the legion’s tents and into the night. Arca realised he had never asked where the poor, afflicted man intended to go; after a moment of thought he decided it was better that he never knew.
Instead he hid his knife, ate the food he had brought with him, leaving scraps and crumbs on the boards of the cart so it would appear that Dorias had been fed before someone else set him loose, and then returned to Guhl’s fire as though nothing untoward had happened. All through the night voices whispered to him inside his head: Dorias would be caught and would tell all; Arca would be whipped from the legion, all his Berdellan treasure would be forfeit; he would live his life as a traitor, a fraud and a coward . . .
It was nothing new. Nothing he had not already lived with. He bartered some of his plundered riches for strong wine – there would not be much gold left when he came home at last �
�� and drowned the voices mercilessly. Dorias’s absence was not noticed until the early morning, and Arca had little trouble making his tale believed. Guhl was angry, but he saw no point to chasing after a single deserter, and a madman at that. The legion marched on.
“But he knew,” Arca told Cassia. “He rode past and looked at me, and he knew.”
“Baum?”
Arca nodded. “He never said anything. He didn’t have to.”
Cassia was not surprised. In fact what Arca had told her tied together more of Baum’s story and his grand scheme for her. Baum must always have known where Dorias would go, that the “gods” who had called to him were no real gods. He must have tied Dorias into his own plans, and used his presence in Lyriss to assist him in monitoring Malessar’s movements. Cassia was unsure how he would have done that, but she suspected Dorias’s “gods” must have been involved.
Hopefully, Dorias himself would be able to shed light on that part of the tale.
Lyriss was as unremarkable and poor as she remembered. If anything it seemed to have deteriorated further in the half-year since she had first visited the ailing town and its barren fields. Smoke rose from only a handful of cottages, and only a few men worked the land to secure the last of the year’s harvests. They kept their distance, even more than the farmers she had encountered earlier on this journey, retreating from the road as soon as they saw the travellers.
She recalled what Baum had told her on her previous visit. Most of the men would have ventured in armed groups into more populated, fertile lands back along the road, to steal the food they needed to survive the winter. She had been lucky to avoid running into such a group, although she was willing to admit that the presence of the shieldmen might have something to do with that. As Cassia led them between the town’s outermost buildings she heard doors scrape into their frames, shutters slamming hard into place. The streets, already quite empty, were now populated only by scrawny dogs and fowl that pecked in the dirt for scraps and grain. The gibbet at the gate was vacant, as though even the corpses had chosen to leave.