by Steven Poore
“Gods, girl, you threatened a dragon.”
In her head, the North laughed at her situation. She squeezed her eyes closed to drive the sound out. It was more difficult than before. “I did? I . . . did. And we still live.”
“Well, if that doesn’t deserve a drink in celebration, I don’t know what does,” Arca said. He sounded as if he was in shock. She heard him cross the rushes and rummage amongst the remaining bottles and casks.
Another sound broke into her fractured thoughts. More footsteps, hard on the ground outside, yet distant too. And heavy enough to be felt underfoot. Like the march of a legion.
Arca did not appear to have heard their approach. He was busy using a short knife to prise the top from the only sealed cask in the tavern, and he did not even turn around when Cassia pulled open the door and peered into the square outside.
There was no sign of Alcibaber, and she thought he must have transfigured himself to join his cousin high above them. Nor were any of the townsfolk to be seen, though the bodies of the dead had evidently been dragged away while she argued with the dragon. All that remained were the tools they had dropped, along with the darker patches of earth where their blood had soaked into the ground. The mists still coiled around the foundations of the buildings, but even they had thinned out now Alcibaber no longer walked the land.
The darkness to the North had not diminished, however, and now it had been joined in the sky by clouds of debris thrown up by the dragons’ emergence from the interior of the hillsides where they had lain dormant for so long. The contours of the land had been changed effortlessly, just like a child might build and then destroy a fort made of clay. Where they had been smooth, topped with stunted and weathered copses and suited only to grazing the hardier breeds of sheep and cattle, now they were shredded heaps of rock and earth. They brought to mind Cassia’s nightmares of Caenthell, of the monster she had envisaged buried beneath the castle, and it was difficult to drag her attention away from them.
But there was movement at the far end of the square, towards the south-western side of the town. Men marching in; a whole column of spear-equipped soldiers, two abreast behind a commander even more massive and broad-shouldered than the men he led. They moved in perfect synchronisation, belying the humanity of their forms.
Cassia breathed out in relief. She shot a glance skywards, wondering whether the dragons would have noticed. They would look for any weakness they could find in her, she was certain of that. But she had the rest of her shieldmen now. That made her stronger.
Not alone, then. Of course, Alcibaber had already known of them. Feyenn must have seen them as it wheeled through the sky. The dragons knew the power she had behind her – that was why Alcibaber had backed off.
Cassia shook her head slowly as she waited for the shieldmen to approach her. I faced down a dragon. Even Pelicos never did that. The drums thrummed at that thought, though whether they laughed with her or at her, she could not tell.
She numbered the ranks: three counts of twenty and another thirteen besides – and then double that number in total. Little wonder the dragons had decided the balance of power had changed in her favour.
The broad-shouldered commander saluted her, one fist thumping against the solid chest. Then it merely waited, along with the silent ranks behind it. The quartet that had come with Cassia from the March seemed to ignore the newcomers, focused on the tasks she had already given them. Having seen off the townsfolk, they stood sentinel around the horses instead. The animals were clearly panicked, both by the fighting and by the menacing presence of the dragons, but the shieldmen held the reins firm. As far as Cassia could tell, breaking free of them would be a feat akin to pulling down the pillars of the temple’s portico.
“Take a squad,” she told the new commander. “Make certain the road to the North is passable both on foot and horseback.”
The commander saluted again. Then, without so much as a word, it and five others – Cassia could not tell how they had been chosen – turned out of the assembled ranks. They marched onwards, out of the town once more, leaving her in silence with the rest of the company.
She heard Arca cough again, a heavy rasp that ended with him hawking onto the ground at his feet. He leaned against the tavern’s frame, apparently so far beyond disbelief that the arrival of these shieldmen had not alarmed him at all. If anything he looked more alert than she had ever seen him. It was as though the years had been turned back, the demons that had weighed him down now cast aside. He wiped his mouth with one sleeve, spat again, and then looked past her in the direction the detached shieldmen had marched.
“Thus assembled, now we are numbered,” he said. “Let our foes count our blades and linger in leisure at their cost, for we are more than the mere metal and wood of our weapons.”
It took Cassia only a moment to place the quote. “The Fall of Stromondor,” she said.
It was apt enough, but also so ironic, that the same story that signalled her departure from the North would now announce her intention to return there. If only she had an audience other than Arca and herself. The shieldmen, if they were capable of recognising the tale at all, showed no sign of appreciating it.
“Guhl was fond of it,” Arca said. “He would recite it before battle, if he could.”
It had been one of her father’s favourites as well. Yet Norrow would only add the lines to the story if he knew he could get away with it. The Northern Factors considered them inflammatory and had forbidden their inclusion on many occasions. Another irony; that Hellean soldiers should bolster their courage with words denied to their own conquered territories.
“Just as we go into battle now?”
Arca nodded. “Aye. It came to mind.”
He lapsed into quiet, but Cassia thought there was more he wanted to say. She waited, feeling the cold of the mists that curled about her feet, and tasting the tang of damp earth in the air.
“I always wondered how those stories came to be told,” Arca said at last. “The defenders of Stromondor marched to their deaths, but some must have lived. One, at least, surely?”
Cassia wasn’t certain how much she should tell him. Baum had lived, but he’d had Pyraete’s favour. Without that, she believed he would have perished along with the men he had rallied. Neither Arca nor Cassia herself had any such favour, whether divine or otherwise. If they did, then she was completely unaware of it.
“One did live,” she told him. “Malessar himself discovered that.”
It sounded truthful enough, and Arca must have thought so too, because his shoulders relaxed a little.
“Then promise me something, Cassia. When you reach the end of this horror – ”
She opened her mouth to protest, but Arca lifted a finger to silence her.
“When this campaign is over, promise me that you will tell our stories. To any who will listen. Ultess and Dorias. Attis. Even Guhl, gods rot his bones.”
Cassia’s breath caught in her throat. “And you too, Arca.”
The old soldier shrugged. “Aye, and me too, then.”
Cassia shook her head. If the last few seasons had not toughened her and shocked her from her innocence, then his plea would have broken her heart. But there was already so much sadness and anger in her soul that there hardly seemed room for any more.
“I’ll tell those stories,” she promised. She could not keep the bitter edge from her tone. “That was all I ever wanted to do.”
14
Cassia paused to look back over her shoulder. The column of shieldmen marched in tight ranks across the hillside behind her, polearms held uniformly and unwaveringly straight. The weight of their tread dug a fresh road out of Lyriss, visible all the way back into the depths of the old kingdom, until they disappeared in the mists that still spread over the ground there.
Mists caused by the re-emergence of the dragons, Cassia thought. Side effects of the sorcery Alcibaber and Feyenn had employed perhaps, or else intended by them to intimidate the people of Lyr
iss. In either case the phenomenon was distinctly unnatural. It showed no sign of dissipating, and in the gathering gloom of the evening the mist was suffused with a strange luminescence, just as the wraiths at Karakhel had been.
Of the dragons themselves there was no sign. The skies were empty, darkening behind the clouds that scudded in from the east. Cassia wondered if the great beasts had come to rest after stretching wings unused for centuries. They might be using the mists as cover while they regathered their strength and digested whatever they had caught.
Whatever they caught . . . She shuddered and pushed the thought from her mind. Surely the dragons would not have been so . . . indiscriminate. Not when the people fleeing before them were part of the very population they had sworn to protect.
Yet she could not avoid thinking more about it. She knew enough of dragons now – or she thought she did – to hold them to the exact promise they had made. Their contract had been to defend Lyriss, she thought. The land, not the folk who lived upon it. Cold horror sank into her bones as she realised what that meant.
“Are you unwell?” Arca asked. “You look pale.”
The words knotted in her throat and she shook her head. Part of her wanted to share the horror with him, to lessen the burden on herself, but she knew instinctively that Arca was not as strong as he made himself appear. The revelation might break him, just as it threatened to break her.
“A long day,” she said at last, shocked by the frailty of her own voice.
“Then we should rest.”
Cassia shook her head again, this time more firmly. She had no intention of spending any more time in this damned country. Caenthell was a horror still to come, and she could push it aside and refuse to think about it, but Lyriss was here and now. She could not spend another night surrounded by the debris – quite literally, she thought, her horse skirting past a rock the dragons had shredded from the heart of the hills – of her decisions and the damage her campaign had wrought.
“No. Not here.”
“Cassia, we have to stop somewhere. And you are in no fit state to continue.”
That was rich, she thought, coming from him. Both his mount and his spare were laden with bottles and casks, some so hastily stoppered that they leaked. Arca had travelled with a bottle in his hand all afternoon, and now he hunched in his saddle like the old man she had first met in Hellea would have done, his reactions slowed and exaggerated by the drink.
“Not here,” she repeated.
There were other considerations, too. The Lyrissans themselves, for example. They must have fled the town in all directions, away from these hills, but they would not be long in directing their anger towards her for what she had unleashed. The presence of her shieldmen had not prevented them attacking her before; whether they were four, or one hundred and four, she doubted they would deter the Lyrissans now either. And when she traversed this path in the other direction, on her way from the North, Baum had said the hills were infested with bandits and robbers. The Factor of Keskor and his legion fought regular skirmishes against these bands. Nobody could have failed to notice the titanic eruption from above Lyriss, and now scouts and opportunists alike would be riding into the passes and the stark woodlands. Cassia decided it would be easier all round to just avoid them if she could.
She struggled to remember the route. It had not looked like this before, of course. The landscape had been overturned like soil ploughed over for planting. The rocks themselves had been shifted around, scattered across the land as oversized tiles tipped from a bag.
Arca lifted the bottle to his lips once more, then cast it aside with a muttered curse into the grass. “Empty, gods damn it. It’s getting dark here, girl.”
“Not much further, I think,” she told him. “There was a fort up here. We camped there one night. It overlooked the hills . . . the ones that looked like the spines of great dragons. Meredith told me the tale.”
“A fort?”
“A ruin,” Cassia corrected herself. “There wasn’t really much shelter.”
“Oh, good. Tumbled stones and harsh winds. And no food, I’ll warrant.”
Cassia sighed. The more Arca drank, the more caustic he became – just like her father. He wasn’t making this stage of the journey any easier.
“What joys await us there, anyway? The bones of the dead, to dance at your whim?”
She smothered her anger, though the temptation to vent it upon him in full was hard to deny. Part of his dark mood was a front, she realised, to mask the pain of Dorias’s death. Her father did the same thing whenever her mother was mentioned to him. Arca’s reasons might be different, but the effect was the same. The best way to deal with such behaviour, she had learned the hard way, was to stay distant from it, to avoid the baited hook. To shrink into silence until the storm had passed.
And Arca was afraid, too. Cassia sensed that, just as she had been able to feel the fear emanating from both Ultess and Rais. The emotions of the living were brought into exaggerated relief when they were surrounded by so many unfeeling stone shieldmen.
Movement on the path ahead brought her from her reverie. A pair of figures stood waiting on the track as it passed around the base of another peak, following an ancient water-cut cleft higher into the hills. Even in the decaying light it was easy to recognise them as shieldmen – two of the small party she had sent ahead to make certain the path was clear.
Arca had seen them too. “More trouble ahead?”
“Perhaps not,” Cassia said, but without much hope in her voice.
The quartet that had assigned themselves to her personal guard accompanied her forward while Arca waited with the rest of the column. There was no sense in risking his safety twice in one day. He did not object to being left behind, for which she was glad.
This pair ahead of her looked as though they had done a full day’s work in the hours since she had sent them North. Their feet and calves were covered in slowly drying soil that flaked away every time they moved, and when Cassia came close to them she saw that their hands and forearms were lined with scratches and chips – evidence of stone scraping against rock as the shieldmen lifted and pushed boulders aside. She hoped the damage was as superficial as it appeared.
One of the shieldmen saluted her, its fist thudding hard against its chest, and then it pointed further up the pathway.
“Yes, obviously,” Cassia muttered to herself – it wasn’t as if the damned things could answer her. “Something is up there. But what?”
To her surprise the other shieldman stepped forward and raised one hand. Cassia blinked: the clenched fist held a pair of metal-tipped arrows. The first shieldman drew her attention back and raised its own hand again, this time displaying all four fingers.
A count – the shieldmen had been attacked and had counted their enemies. But surely they would not do that if their attackers were actually dead . . .
“Archers,” she said aloud. “There’s a ridge above the path, isn’t there? A ridge you cannot climb. And they hold that? But what about . . . what about the rest of you? Are they . . . ?”
The shieldman extended his arm again to point back up the path. It was, the only answer it could give her.
She dismounted and drew her staff from the packs behind her saddle. It would be more use to her on this uneven ground than any sword, however strong or sharp. She gestured to the shieldmen and they led the way up the hillside.
The contours were more recognisable now, she saw. The trees that clung to the lower slopes, their branches hanging out like twisted claws – she remembered those from her last journey through this land, when the tops of the hills were still intact. It didn’t take long for them to come in sight of the smaller ridge below the ruins of the ancient fort. The hill was black against the grey and purple of the sky.
There was light and movement on the top of the ridge – troops and torches, with thin plumes of smoke drifting out in the breeze. The second pair of shieldmen stood on either side of the path, pikearms butte
d against the earth as though they merely guarded the way. The ground before them was littered with iron-tipped shafts, and even as Cassia watched, one sped from the heights to rebound from a shieldman’s stone torso, and another fell short in the grass. The shieldmen had halted near the edge of the archers’ range, as if they had deliberately set out to draw their fire.
Cassia struggled to make out the shapes of the men on the ridge, and she wondered how the shieldmen had managed to count them, but the defenders plainly had no such problem, as her arrival prompted shouts and a fresh volley of arrows.
“Have you attacked them at all?” she asked her escort.
The shieldman nearest to her shook its head ponderously.
The hail of shafts petered out again once it became clear the shieldmen were not going to assault the ridge. Cassia surveyed the ground and remembered how precarious the descent had been from the fort. The shieldmen would have to climb the path in single file, unable to defend themselves, and even a stone warrior could be unbalanced and toppled if the defenders started to throw down rocks from above. It would hardly matter if they ran out of arrows before then.
Yet they needed to pass this fort. Cassia did not know the land well enough to take a route around it, and the bandits or soldiers occupying the fort would hold the advantage. They would ambush her during the night. They would lose heavily in a close engagement, but Cassia could not accept the risk to herself, or to Arca. No, the only way to manage this was through negotiation.
It would take too long to gather up brushwood, so she collected the scattered shafts instead, binding them hurriedly into a thick and stunted approximation of a torch. It would have to suffice, she thought, digging into the pouch at her waist for flints to light the splinters she had set aside. Once the torch caught alight, she ordered the shieldmen to remain where they were, hoping her quartet of bodyguards would obey along with the others, and made her way over to the base of the slope.
“Hold your fire!” she shouted up. “I am unarmed!”