by Steven Poore
Cassia had to change their perception of her, she knew. Vescar and Tarves knew it too. Their reputations depended upon the outcome of this council.
“Do you really know so little, Vescar Almoul?” She moved aside to give him a clear view of the shieldmen. “You’re a half-captain of the legions. You must have been into Hellea. Do you know what these soldiers are?”
“They are foul sorcery, girl,” Vescar said. He touched the pin of his cloak in a warding gesture. “She must be thrown from our camp. No gods-fearing man should ever associate with such evil.”
Cassia shook her head. “Wrong.” She turned to the next man in the council. “Do you recognise them, sir? Or you, sir? These are the Emperor’s shieldmen. They have guarded the Empire since the days of Manethrar himself – guarded against just this circumstance. Yes, they were made by the warlock Malessar; and yes, they are sorcerous and strange, and they unnerve me as much as they would anybody else here, but he made them to guard against the North ever rising again.”
She glanced up at the skies. It was too dark to clearly see the clouds that hung over the mountains, but she was close enough to Caenthell that they were a physical presence, a pressure against her heart and soul. Surely the others must be able to feel that pressure? It was like standing beneath an overhanging cliff, knowing that the rock might give way and crash down on top of her at any moment.
“And the North has risen,” she said softly. She looked back down at them again. “And so here we are, standing against it.”
One of the commanders shifted. His frown was of calculation, rather than outright distrust, but he could not quite meet her eyes. “The Emperor has sent you? He has sent reinforcements?”
He wasn’t talking to her, she realised. He was talking past her. To Arca. Her hand dropped to the hilt of her sword, fingers tight with anger, before she could stop herself.
Arca had grace enough to look embarrassed. “Not precisely,” he said.
It was difficult to keep the fury of the North from reverberating through her words. That would certainly have sent the entire camp into a panic. Cassia let her gaze sweep across the council until every officer, even Tarves Almoul, was forced to look away. “Arca does not lead this force,” she said. “These shieldmen are under my command, and mine alone.”
Vescar laughed harshly, even though he did not have the courage to face her directly. “A fool’s fantasy! A girl with an army of toy soldiers! Do you think this is a drunkard’s story? Even if they are what you say – and I hardly believe that – what use will they be against that?” He swept a hand out towards the edges of the camp. He was, Cassia realised, himself the worse for drink. Even Arca was a model of sobriety compared to him. His stock really had fallen in the past half-year.
“This is no story,” Cassia said. She fixed her attention upon the men who were clearly not part of the Almoul faction. “It is far, far worse than that. This is all the evil pent up behind the wards of Caenthell, concentrated and warped by centuries of imprisonment, and released upon the world to destroy it. We have to stop it. We have to gather all our forces together, and work together and co-operate rather than bicker with each other . . .”
Her words trailed off. She looked around at their faces once more and read the despair in them. They had pinned all their hopes on reinforcements from Hellea, she realised. Hopes that she had just dashed. Even if the Emperor had called for a march to the North, it might be weeks before any more legions arrived. Weeks that she surely did not have.
“There are no other forces.” Tarves broke the silence with blunt, heavy words. “No legions, no outriders, no militias. There is only us. And we cannot fight whatever this damned thing is, girl. We are losing. Dying. We are retreating. The North is lost.”
It was not so long ago, Cassia thought absently, that she had stood atop this hill with Meredith and Baum, wondering how her life might play out. Listening to stories about dragons and lost kingdoms. Marvelling that she could almost reach out to touch the Age of Talons, even at a distance of several centuries. Now those things threatened to collapse her world completely. She was as helpless as a snowflake in a storm.
Tarves had spoken the truth. She still hated him, and his brothers, but he had been honest with her. This camp – they were all refugees. They had already fought for their lands, and they had lost.
It was obvious now. The horizon, where these hills guided the March up into Keskor before passing below old Caenthell, glowed with a sickly, nebulous light. Cassia recognised it from her brief visit to Karakhel as the mist that had seeped through the fort, and that her ghostly companions had battled against. Now it was stronger: it occupied vast tracts of land, pulsing faintly in the darkness. Pulsing with the beat of the drums that sounded inside her head.
The mist was hungry. It devoured everything in its path, and there seemed to be some kind of malignant intelligence behind it. It would pause to consolidate its gains, entrenching itself in the land before moving forwards once more. Sometimes it was more aggressive, one of the commanders explained to her. It might swallow up land faster than a man could run. Or it might creep forwards, the grass browning and dying visibly at the touch of its questing tendrils.
It seemed that now Tarves had admitted the hopelessness of their position the barrier between Cassia and the commanders had been broken. They needed to explain themselves to someone, to justify their retreat. They needed . . . absolution, though she was not certain she was in any position to grant them that.
“At first it was as though the gods themselves were at war,” another commander said. He had been an officer in Keskor’s garrison. A senior quartermaster, too old to continue in the field, yet too steeped in the life of the legion to leave it. “Buildings shattered before our eyes. Men blinded by shards of stone. Temples gutted. People fled into the dark. And the sound . . .”
“War drums,” Hetch said. “They came from everywhere.”
“And then the mists came. A sorcerous army of destruction, hidden from us by smoke. They sapped our very souls and dragged my men away to hellish, unimaginable deaths.” The quartermaster’s hands shook. “No man could have withstood that onslaught. It was more dreadful than any infantry charge I ever saw.”
Yet some did defy Caenthell, at least to begin with. Lines were formed: men with shields and spears, advancing on the mists with fierce cries. The mists swallowed them whole. They did not return. Others made wild, desperate attempts to rescue them, cutting at the tendrils with their swords. They were seized and dragged into the mists after their comrades, just as the ghosts at Karakhel had been.
Fire burned the tendrils back, the soldiers discovered, almost by accident. They regrouped even as they retreated, gathering terrified men women and children behind them, and they stripped the land as they passed through it, carrying anything that would burn with them. And if they could not carry it, they burned it anyway.
The following days were an unending nightmare of desperate attacks, desperate stands, and desperate retreats. The malignant tendrils seemed to taunt the soldiers as they were picked off in ones and twos. The ragtag column was joined by other refugees, and by remnants of other squads that had been detached from the legion before the assault began. The commanders were forced to draft in some of the unwilling refugees to bolster their ranks, issuing them with second-rate weapons and scraps of armour and setting them to watch the route ahead of them. The regular soldiers were drawn back to the other side of the column, to hold the line against the terrifying mists.
There were desertions, of course, even after the makeshift council ordered the execution of any man caught fleeing the camp or his post. But those desertions were fewer in number than the commanders had expected. Where was there to go, after all, except to the south? And if this mist presaged the end of the world, then perhaps any attempt to flee was doomed to failure. If the alternative to death in numbers was death alone, then it was no alternative at all, another of the old commanders told Cassia.
And that
was why they were here, at this watchtower. On the northern side the pass below it was defensible, at least for a while. Perhaps long enough to allow the women and children to escape into Lyriss. Perhaps even long enough for Hellea to rouse itself to anger.
But now they knew that would not happen. And Lyriss itself had become dangerous – the mists had devastated the hillsides and covered the land until only swirling, reptilian shapes could be seen. No man of conscience could send children into such a cauldron of death, the commanders had agreed earlier that day. Now there was nothing else they could do – nothing but wait for Caenthell’s fury to catch up with them.
Try as she might, Cassia could not convince the council that Lyriss might yet be a safe haven. It was difficult enough to make them listen to her to begin with, when they were plainly unused to taking any sort of suggestion from a woman. And with the elder Almouls settled into outright hostility against her, talking to the other commanders without interruption was quite impossible.
“So where is your protector now, eh?” Vescar asked. “That murderous thug you cowered behind? Where is he?”
He jabbed an accusing finger in her direction. “She has accomplices. Partners in her foul plans. A swordsman who pretended peace and then fell upon my troops, and an old man who burned the life from the survivors of that fight. Ask her where they are – what part they have to play in all of this.”
Cassia gritted her teeth, both against his words and against the insistent thudding of the war drums that only she could hear. Bickering would get them nowhere, but pride and petty vengeance was clearly more important to Vescar Almoul than any chance of turning the tide against Caenthell and Jedrell’s warped spirits.
“Why does that matter?” she said. “Baum is dead; Meredith is gone. If you are still scared of them, after they humiliated you in battle – a fight you instigated – then you need be no longer.”
Vescar’s face coloured deeper into anger but, before he could say anything else, Tarves leaned forward and caught his gaze. There was an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and Vescar clamped his mouth tight, his lips the thinnest of lines, and stormed from the council as heavily as his limp would allow.
Tarves turned his attention back to Cassia. His eyes were dark and dangerous. Cassia wondered if he might simply order her removed and executed before his family’s name was sullied any further. Rann Almoul would never have stood for such behaviour from any of his sons. He would have been apoplectic by now.
And that made her think for a moment. Almoul’s sons were all here, but Rann himself was not. She looked across at Attis the moneylender and caught him unaware for an instant before he raised his mask of stern indifference once more. There was grief as well as anger in the old man’s expression; loss and regret warred with something else that caused the faintest shadow of a smile.
Something to do with Arca, perhaps? The two men had served together, after all.
And where was Rann Almoul?
“You know why we are here, girl. But why are you here? Hetch was right, bloody fool that he is – we never thought to see you again, let alone at the head of an army of . . .” Tarves gestured at the quartet of shieldmen that still protected her. “These things, whatever you name them. How do you come to lead them?”
“They answered my summons,” Cassia told him. It was the truth, after all.
Attis spoke at last. “You seem to know more than we do of what is happening here, Cassia. Would you explain it to us?”
She hesitated, but the elderly moneylender did not appear to be mocking her at all. Not like the Almouls.
“Tell me how Baum died,” Attis prompted her. “If I die tonight, or tomorrow, then at least I can know that the bastard suffered.”
Had she not already felt the same way, she might have been surprised by Attis’s words. She stared at him for a moment longer as she gathered her thoughts, and then she began to recount the tale of the last half-year.
Not all of it, of course. There were parts no man should ever need to know; parts that would remain dark and secret in her heart. The strength of her feelings for Meredith, and her naive hope that he would love her in return. And the shame she had felt in her betrayal of Malessar’s trust. Those pains belonged to her, and never to anybody else. When she reached more recent events, she kept details to a minimum. Hetch glowered when she mentioned Rais’s name, as though he still believed she was his property, and several of the other commander looked less than happy at the idea of a Galliarcan prince leading an army into the North.
“How many of these stone men are there?” the former quartermaster asked, voicing the council’s uncertainty.
Cassia could only shrug. “I lost count.”
“And you really believe they might drive this evil back into the mountains?”
Cassia wasn’t sure what she believed any more. Yet that was not what this council wanted to hear. “I think this is what Malessar made them for,” she said.
Tarves Almoul’s stern gaze had turned distinctly sceptical. “And you are the one nominated to lead them? You, a girl who was bought for the price of your father’s debts? Why should we believe it? Pass the command of these stone beasts to the council. You have not the wit to make proper use of them.”
Defiant, she placed her hands on her hips and stared back at him. Hetch’s brothers had scared her ever since she was a child, but she found that she was not afraid of them now. There were worse things in the world than mere men, even if they had been taught to wield their power and wealth as weapons, as the Almouls had.
“No.”
Tarves’s eyes widened. “What? Girl—”
She gave the crackling energy of the war drums free rein in her voice. “My name is Cassia. I am Heir to the North. Three dragons acknowledge me as such. The shieldmen are mine to command. You may follow me if you wish.”
The council was silent. Two of the commanders had dropped to one knee, their heads bowed before her. Tarves sat stunned on his low stool, but the expression on his face told Cassia that his hold over the ragtag army was broken. The council might have followed him through the strength of his family’s name and wealth, but that crumbled to nothing next to the ancient power of the mountains themselves.
At his side, the moneylender wore a grim smile. “Then it is decided,” Attis said. “We turn and fight.”
16
Cassia was exhausted, but she could not sleep. That was a luxury denied her tonight, she realised soon after the council divided into its constituent camps. Taking charge of an army did not happen just like that. There were protocols to be followed, introductions to be made. It seemed the entire camp had to physically move by some indefinable fraction to make room for her.
How would her heroes have handled such a situation? Given a moment of quiet to herself, Cassia managed to break away to the outskirts of the hilltop camp, where the watchtower overlooked the terrain to the North, and there she asked herself that question over and over again, never finding any answer. Her thoughts skittered from subject to subject, a sure sign of exhaustion.
So many of the heroes of the old stories had never led an army into battle – or if they did those details had been lost along the way. There was only the tale of the Fall of Stromondor, where Baum himself had come to the aid of Jathar Leon Learth, but even that was suspect to Cassia’s mind now.
“Be as Pelicos,” she muttered under her breath. But that rogue would have been away like his heels were on fire if he had been left in such a mess as this.
At least here she was guaranteed some space to herself. Tarves and his council of commanders had posted a heavier guard on this side of the hill, to warn the rest of the camp if the mists rolled forward at speed, but this watch was too focused upon its duties to notice one girl stood alone in the dark behind them. They kept one eye on the horizon, looking for the tell-tale luminescence seeping across the fields while they busied themselves binding together torches. The perimeter was marked by a line of unlit fires; Cassia presumed th
ey would be lit only when the mists began to advance up towards them.
She looked out into the dark and wondered how distant the March was from here. She had no intention of marching straight into the North, not just yet, but she had no idea how far away Rais’s half of the army was. She wished she could feel him inside her head as she could the damned drums of Caenthell.
A cough, and the sound of a man breathing hard as he negotiated the uneven ground to approach her. A lantern swung low to light the path, though its shutters were pulled closed for the most part.
“Cassia.”
She exhaled slowly and hid her irritation at being disturbed. Attis had never done anything to hurt her, she reminded herself.
Except that he had tried to buy her.
As he came closer she smelled wine upon him. That was a surprise, for Attis had always frowned upon her father’s vices. It was a large part of the animosity they displayed to each other.
“Arca said you preferred your own company.” Attis paused to catch his breath. After a long pause he spoke again, apparently eager to fill the silence. “Vescar is a fool, and his betters know him for such. A yapping puppy, kicked for his insolence and bitter at the hurt, nothing more. But still an Almoul. Remember that.”
Cassia had already come to that conclusion. She watched Attis through the darkness as he struggled to make himself comfortable on the ground. She wasn’t sure what to make of the man. He had entered the bidding to buy her, back at the beginning of all this, yet he had also tried to warn her against Baum. Both he and Arca had campaigned with Baum against the Berdellans, and Attis had to have been deep inside the plot against Malessar, yet he was overjoyed to hear that Baum was dead at last. She might ask every man of Guhl’s Company what they knew and receive thirty different answers, she thought sourly, and still she would not possess half the truth.
“Guhl’s Company,” Attis murmured, as though he had plucked the name from her thoughts. “I hoped – I prayed – that I had left that life behind. That nothing would ever come of it. But that bastard . . .”