by Steven Poore
Vescar gave a strangled cry and dropped once more. Cassia heard his heels kick against the ground; after a moment more, he stopped moving.
She settled slowly onto her haunches and stared at the soldier’s body. A dark shape against the hillside. Pelicos might have had some pungent wit with which to lighten the situation, to make the audience laugh. Cassia could think of nothing. Almost absently, she wiped the blade of her sword on the fox-fur, which was already matted with dirt. Blood dripped from her brow.
There was movement from further up the hillside. Shouting and lights. Someone had heard the fight. Cassia closed her eyes so that all she could see was the darkness.
And the drums started again.
18
You didn’t have to kill him,” Arca said. He wiped at her face, his hands claw-like around a damp and foul-smelling cloth.
Cassia had insisted she was perfectly capable of looking after herself, but the old man decided otherwise. And, given the faint tremble she felt threatening to break free in her muscles, she had finally given in. It took all her determination not to shake as much as Arca usually did, and she was not sure how long she could hold on to herself.
“She did,” Attis said from behind her. This was his tent; it would have been difficult to eject him from it. At the moment he sat on a low camp stool by the entrance, keeping a sharp eye on the bustle outside. “He came that close to doing the same to her, Arca. That close. It wouldn’t even have been a shallow grave – just a young girl left to the wolves. She had no other choice.”
“So much for your allies.” Arca flexed his fingers for a moment and then returned his attention to Cassia’s face. They were both behaving as though she was not actually there. “We’ll be lucky to wake up in the morning, let alone march North again.”
Attis grunted. “Vescar was not that popular. I think we’ll live. We shall see . . .”
Arca muttered under his breath, mocking the other man’s apparent optimism. “And as to you, girl, what were you thinking, to wander off alone? The perimeter is there for a reason, you know.”
“I thought it was there to ward off danger,” she said.
“Aye, and to keep troublemakers inside, where we can see them,” Arca said pointedly. “He must have thought the gods had showered him with golden piss when you buggered off into the night. No guard, no witnesses – gods above, you could not have given him a better signal if you had led him out by the hand and handed him a knife!”
Cassia looked away. Her cheeks burned, and not just from the force with which Arca scrubbed at her skin. “I wanted some time to myself. That’s all.”
Another grunt, and Attis crossed the small space to join them. He lifted Cassia’s hand and simply held it for a moment, as if weighing something up. Then he made her raise her head so he could stare down at her. He looked into her eyes for a long moment, and then gave a slight nod, as if satisfied by what he saw there. It was not done unkindly, Cassia realised; her grandfather was not making a judgement upon her.
“Your first,” he observed, looking down at her hand again. With that hand she had opened Vescar’s throat, Cassia thought. Yet it shivered like that of an old man. Or a drunkard.
“I think so,” she said.
Arca let the stained cloth fall and barked a laugh that threatened to become a cough. “You think so? You should either know or not, girl.”
“There was a man in Hellea, the first time I was there. Marko. He tried to grab me . . . so I hit him. With my staff.”
Arca’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Dangerous as you are, Cassia, I doubt you killed anyone that day. Although if you mean the man I think you do, he may have wished himself dead from embarrassment afterwards.”
“If it had to be done, then it had to be done,” her grandfather put in. He squeezed her hand gently and then released it. “How do you feel?”
It was the most stupid question anyone had ever asked her. For a moment she felt like laughing, and then shouting, and then curling into a tight ball and shutting out the world completely. Perhaps there was a specific emotion she was supposed to experience after killing a man. If that was the case, she wished somebody would tell her what it was so she could say she felt it.
“Sick,” she said at last.
Attis nodded again. “Drink up, and then go and lie down.”
“You want me to sleep? After that?”
“No,” he said with slow patience. “I want you to go and lie down.”
Cassia shook her head, but Attis had assumed the same tone with which he lectured fresh-faced Imperial functionaries who thought they knew how best to run Keskor. She had witnessed such conversations before, and they rarely ended well for anyone other than Attis himself. Cassia’s head – her entire body – ached too much to even attempt to start an argument with him.
Attis had turned his attention back to Arca. “Make sure this tent is guarded. Can you direct Cassia’s stone men? Will they listen to you?”
Arca shrugged. “Gods know why they would.”
“Bring half a dozen here. I’ll wait until you return. That drink is still waiting, young girl.”
Cassia reached out without looking for the cup he had left at her side. It was a bitter cordial, sweetened with too much honey, and she grimaced at the first taste, but Attis watched her keenly until she tilted the cup at him to prove it was empty.
The bedroll he indicated was too thin to be comfortable – it emphasised every lump on the ground beneath, but Cassia had lain on worse before. Usually her father had kept both bedrolls for himself and she would curl up on the ground wherever it was most sheltered from the wind. Attis had not relaxed at all, his gaze darting around the inside of the tent, watching the shadows that the firelight outside cast onto the canvas. For the first time she noticed the sword belted at his waist. It was flat and plain, a soldier’s weapon, the scabbard old but well-oiled. It was not the weapon he had owned when he was younger: according to the story he had told her, his wife took that one when she left him. Yet this sword did not look out of place . . . or was it that Attis himself no longer looked out of place?
It was an effort to speak. “I can look after myself. You don’t have to . . .”
“I’m certain you can,” Attis said. Cassia would have bristled at his condescending tone if she’d possessed the energy. Or any energy at all, come to that.
She tried to sit up – and closed her eyes instead.
The drums were dull, as though she heard them through a deep mountain fog; the kind of weather that made even experienced shepherds and fieldsmen halt and build a fire for safety. In that sort of fog, a man might wander so far off course that he was never seen again.
Cassia scrambled over rocks – over squared-off blocks, she realised, some still jagged and seared where sorcery had pared them from the whole. That sorcery was long gone, however, and the stone was so cold it numbed her hands, leeching warmth from her just as the mists at Karakhel had tried to do.
Her swords weighed her down, pulling at her hip and pushing her spine, forcing her to twist to compensate for their presence. They had never weighed so much before. Caenthell must have done this to them. For a moment she struggled with her balance, almost slipping backwards. The stone waited below to drink her warm blood, but she clung fast to the great blocks, not daring to move until she had regained her strength. Her fingers were bruised and raw with the effort.
If she lifted her gaze, at the top of the tumbled slope far above her she could see the branches of a tree, stretching out into the sky. A ragged banner had been impaled there, and even though there was no breeze to be felt here, the banner moved gently, as though caressed by invisible hands.
This was a different Caenthell to her previous visions. The land was churned, cursed and ruined, just as before, and the terrain made no sense at all. The foundations of the ancient fortress shifted as wilfully as overnight snow, presenting a different view every time she turned around. But something fundamental had changed now. Before, she had
been taunted by the revenant spirits that had been bound to the land. They had demanded she show fear, that she submit to them as the rest of the North inevitably would. They whispered untruths and half-truths to her, until she could not tell them apart. They threatened her.
This time the spirits were silent. The weight of the weapons she carried was all that acted against her. The ghosts had withdrawn, or had been ordered away. Cassia cursed herself for her stupidity. At this moment, clinging for dear life to a stone block that might at any instant topple her back to the foot of this hill, as broken as everything else in this terrible land, the very last thing she ought to be doing was imagining what manner of creature could command Caenthell’s restless ghosts.
Fear me.
The voice was a faint echo, but it was enough to spur Cassia upwards again. She found it impossible to pinpoint the direction it had come from, but she guessed by the tickling sensation across the back of her neck that whatever had spoken could now see her.
This is not a restful place.
She almost laughed. Almost.
At last the gradient gave way to an uneven hilltop. The tree – the same tree she had seen before, as though it was capable of wandering from place to place like a mountain goat – reached out into the sky from between two massive blocks, branches grasping at the air. Cassia looked around as she rested on her haunches to regain her breath. This was the strangest hill she had ever seen. Stone blocks, similar to the sort used in the construction of the fort at Karakhel but far larger, had been piled here and then left to the elements. Withered plants crawled out of cracks, their roots sucking at small patches of soil that had accumulated over the years. The whole edifice looked alarmingly unstable. Cassia wondered why she had thought climbing it would be a good idea. If the gods had birthed a child, and the infant had been one of the giants, left to play on its own in the mountains, it might have constructed this hill from the cracked ruins of Caenthell.
Sometimes she wished her imagination was less vivid.
She turned to face the tree. The ragged banner was still entangled in the web of dead branches. Except this time she was not surprised to find the banner was actually the remnants of her father’s cloak.
Fear me.
“I don’t think so!” she shouted. The swirling fog took the echo from her voice, just as it had muffled the drums in her head. “It is you who should fear me!”
Cassia drew one of the swords – Meredith’s heavy blade this time – and turned in place, watching the faint shadows flitting through the momentary gaps in the fog. The sword felt unbalanced and ill-suited to her grip, more so than usual. She adjusted her stance and began to move through one of the forms Meredith had taught her, slowing it to suit her weariness. It had been years, whole centuries seemingly, since she had executed these moves with her full natural grace. Too long.
Abruptly she stopped and lowered the blade. Too long? Surely it had only been the other day?
She looked back up at the tree. “You’re playing with me. Stop it.”
The branches swayed, despite the fact that there was no wind to move them. Cassia shivered.
“Who are you anyway? Where are you? Show yourself!”
She stepped closer to the tree. The twisted trunk looked as if it had been turned to iron. Cassia shifted her grip and swung the sword at it. The blade sank deep into the trunk, so deep the wood seized it and it stuck fast.
The whole landscape shuddered. Cassia was thrown onto her knees. The stone blocks beneath her moved. Shards exploded into the sky all around her, striking her arms and shoulders.
I am here.
The voice seared her mind. It sounded like stone. Iron and stone. And blood. Cassia tasted the blood and anger. She clung to the stone as it moved beneath her.
I have always been here.
Something – someone – was buried underneath this hill, just as the dragons had been buried at Lyriss. And now it was awake. Now it was shaking away the weight of the earth and the rocks that had covered it. And it was loud. Cassia could not hear herself scream.
The North had risen.
She awoke gasping for breath, her clothes stuck to skin damp with sweat. Salt pricked the corners of her eyes and sat on her tongue when she moistened her lips.
The tent was empty. Attis and his sword were gone, but Cassia heard movement and shouting beyond the thin canvas walls as the routine of the camp progressed, as steady and certain as day followed night. Except that now, she thought, day did not follow night. It must be around dawn, yet the tent was still dark. There was no sun. The fear that it might not rise at all nagged at the back of her mind.
She crawled from the bed, muscles cramping with every movement, and searched the tent for her weapons and her coat. By the time she found the blood-matted fox fur the chill had penetrated her clothes, making the sweat uncomfortably cold upon her skin. Cassia tried to disregard the blood, but it was a vivid reminder of what had happened the previous night.
It had been too dark to see clearly, but she knew Vescar’s face, and her imagination supplied the mix of anger and surprise that must have overlaid his features as she sliced his throat open. Cassia wondered how he had looked when he was carried back to the camp. Had those emotions fled along with his life? Or could Tarves and Hetch see in their brother’s dead eyes the venom that had made him attack her?
Cassia hesitated before fastening her belt and shifting the scabbard that held Pelicos’s blade to a more comfortable position. For the first time since Malessar gifted her the sword she wondered if it truly belonged at her side. She was more certain of Meredith’s sword. She might possess it now and even carry it as he might have done, but she could never claim it as her own.
There was movement outside the tent. Footsteps and rasping breath. Cassia pushed her shoulders back, one hand dropping to the hilt of her sword. She knew even before the flap was pushed aside who her visitor was, but she could not make herself relax. The drums would not let her.
“You’re awake.” Arca sounded surprised. He glanced down at her hand and frowned, but he said nothing else.
“I didn’t mean to sleep,” Cassia said.
“Aye, well, that wasn’t my idea.”
“Of course not.” Cassia hesitated again. She wished she did not have to ask the question. “What happened? I mean . . . the commanders . . . ?”
“They argued. A lot.” Arca jerked his head to indicate another part of the camp. “They’ve been sat there all night.”
“And . . . Hetch? And Tarves?”
“Them two? They’re still here.”
She had half-expected them to have left, along with as much of the makeshift legion as they still commanded. That they had not gone was not the relief it should have been. Her army was still intact – but most likely at the cost of the willing co-operation of the remaining Almouls.
Arca nodded again. “Come on then, girl. They’re waiting for you.”
The sky appeared a shade lighter to the east, but the dark, swirling clouds that poured from Caenthell now stretched from horizon to horizon, sealing the land away from the watchful eyes of the gods. Cassia felt hemmed in the moment she stepped into the open, pinned to the ground by the weight of the clouds.
The tent was guarded by a ring of stone. A dozen shieldmen stood with their backs to the canvas, the wide blades of their swords drawn and held up in a half-salute. For one moment it looked as though Attis had purposefully pitched his tent in the middle of an ancient circle dedicated to some ancient god of war, but then the soldiers began to move, sheathing their weapons in concert. Perhaps it was the light, or the lack of it, but Cassia thought the shieldmen had altered in some subtle fashion overnight. It was as if they had become more . . . human. But perhaps it was only that the land had become bleaker and more hostile.
Four of the shieldmen stepped out of their circle to become her bodyguard. Cassia wondered if this was the same quartet that had accompanied her since Lyriss. She did not want bodyguards, but – and she did
not have to look at Arca to know what he thought of it all – it seemed that from here onwards she would not be safe without them. She would not be allowed to walk, or ride, or eat, or even rest without them. If Vescar had achieved anything, it was to destroy any last illusion of her own independence and freedom. Even Rais had not done so much.
Attis’s tent was near the heart of the camp. It was only a short walk across the damp ground to where the other commanders sat around a small fire. Although the majority of the women and children had been left behind at the Lyrissan borders, the legion still possessed a small cadre of boys to take care of the everyday menial tasks considered below the dignity of an Imperial captain. One of these boys – smaller and younger than was usual, since all his elder fellows had been conscripted to fill the gaps in the legion’s ranks – fed scraps onto the fire and poked at the glowing heart of the small pit to keep it alive. Other boys ghosted around the back of the meeting, bringing fruit and water. Cassia noted absently that the fruit had to be deadfallen, scavenged from the ground in hastily abandoned orchards. It was bruised and had lost as much colour as the rest of the land. She had spent weeks every autumn living from such scraps. If the captains themselves were reduced to such fare then the march North was already in danger of collapse, even before they considered Vescar’s death.
The commanders watched her approach in silence. Several were red-faced, tensed and plainly angered, while others – Attis and Havinal amongst them – looked more composed, their emotions held firmly in check. Tarves Almoul sat as still as any shieldman, Vescar’s sword laid bare across his lap. Cassia thought of the High King of old, Gallemas, sitting in judgement over his disobedient son Gethis, and she wondered if that thought had also passed through Tarves’s mind. It was more likely that he had never even heard of Gallemas and Gethis – after all, even Norrow himself had never heard that tale before Baum narrated it.
Hetch stood beyond the circle of commanders, barely illuminated by the firelight. Arms folded tight over his chest, he was accompanied by two young men who Cassia thought she recognised as belonging to Hetch’s old gang. They had egged him on into mischief, and ganged up against her when it came to mock fights with sticks. Nodding donkeys, her father had once called them, though not within earshot of Hetch. Even he knew better than to insult the Almouls in public. If it came to a fight this morning, at least there were two men in the audience she could guarantee to soundly thrash. Three, if she counted Hetch himself.