The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  The drums played upon her guilt. They laughed at her attempt to minimise the death toll that an all-out battle would surely bring. They challenged her to make a sacrifice so huge that even Pyraete himself could not possibly ignore it.

  The only consolation Cassia could find, the slenderest of threads, was that if she had little idea what she would do once she reached the heart of Caenthell, then the High King would surely have even less.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. Rais had insisted vehemently that she should be accompanied by more than just her contingent of shieldmen, and despite her own arguments she had failed to prevent him attaching two squads of scouts, to give her infiltration a more human element. Lightly armoured, for what use was armour against this fog anyway? They were armed with bows and short blades, the rest of their equipment consisting mainly of brands, torches and flasks of thick pitch and oil. They looked more like woodsmen than soldiers, but they kept up easily with the relentless stride the shieldmen set. Cassia had told them to return to the main force that was headed for Gethista, but they affected not to hear her. More of Rais’s work, she was certain. And after the first couple of hours she gritted her teeth, resigning herself to their presence.

  The scouts loped along in twos and threes, scattered throughout the immaculately formed column of stone soldiers. There were few young men amongst them; their faces were etched with years of experience in service against the Berdellans and the nomads that lived beyond those grasslands. Cassia could see why Rais and Havinal had picked them for this task.

  They marched quickly along the road back towards Keskor, while the main bulk of the legion headed upwards into the hills. For a long while Cassia could look over to her right and see faint glimmering against the murk. Havinal was as good as his word, burning his way up the old roads, forcing the High King to take notice of him. Once or twice there was a larger flare, followed by an unearthly screeching call that froze the blood in her veins.

  Feyenn. Or perhaps Alcibaber. She could not tell: either one of the dragons might have agreed to watch over the legion if it suited the beasts to do so. She hoped that whichever it was, the other had agreed to go with Rais on his part of the mission.

  Thoughts of the dragons made her glance upwards for a moment, as if she might see Craw’s tail disturb the low clouds. She could feel it watching her . . .

  Nobody had ever made such a bargain with a dragon. Rais had pointed that out to her, rather more forcefully than Cassia thought necessary. She knew enough of the legends without any lectures from him. But she could not think of any other way to get all of her pieces in position on the board.

  This is no game! Rais had almost shouted. These are dragons, and they are playing with you! Can’t you see that? He had come close to shaking her by the shoulders then, only releasing her when he met her stare and wilted under it. Cassia, think again.Please.

  What would you have me do? She twisted free of him, though in truth she would rather have collapsed into the warmth of his arms and surrendered her cares for an hour or so of peace. Would you prefer I sent you all to your deaths?

  You may as well be. Rais’s anger was like that of a boy denied his games. I will go to mine, if need be – but for Peleanna’s sake, Cassia, not like this.

  You know tactics and leadership, Rais. And history too. I am doing the right thing. Admit it.

  He would not look at her after that. You don’t make this easy, Cassia.

  He had not waited for her reply, and by the morning he had gathered his riders and a supply of torches, and they were gone before she had a chance to wish him well. Westwards, for the Dragontail Pass, where she hoped he would be far safer than at her side. Arca gave her the news, one scarred finger rubbing the neck of a half-empty wineskin as he hugged it close to him.

  Did I do wrong? she had asked the old soldier.

  He looked about for a moment, as if hoping that she had directed the question to someone else. But since Craw’s appearance in the legion’s council, few of the commanders dared to approach her. They were all scared of her, she realised.

  We all did, Arca replied at last. We all did.

  He left her too, then. Perhaps his departure had something to do with the fact that she had insisted both Arca and Ultess carry on to Gethista. She had no intention of having to carry out her promise to him. Not if she could help it.

  The senior officer of the scout squads jogged across to her, flanked by another of his men. They moved in pairs, to make it more difficult for Caenthell’s mists to pick them off one by one. One kept watch on the ground they moved over, while the other watched the middle distance, as far as the endless murk would allow.

  If Lissus had any trouble with the idea of following her into Caenthell, he showed no sign of it. While some of his scouts steered clear of the shieldmen, or eyed them with understandable caution, Lissus had only nodded his appreciation of their strength. If only there were more such as him in the legion, perhaps Cassia would not have had such a struggle to bring the commanders around to her side.

  “Nothing alive on this ground,” Lissus said. He was not one to waste words. “Not even tracks. Road’s clear too.”

  She nodded, mulling over his words. He had a point: even if there were no more refugees to come from the Northern towns, surely there should have been some sign of their flight. Debris, broken wheels, abandoned carts, lamed beasts left for dead. Some of her father’s stories mentioned such things, especially those that dealt with the way the Hordes had driven all the way to the gates of Stromondor. But there was nothing. It was as if the mists had dragged all obstacles from the road . . . to make her path easier.

  The drums beat within her mind, but their focus was not truly upon her, she thought. Jedrell looked to Gethista and to the west, where Rais was riding hard for the Dragontail Pass. But, still . . .

  “Keep your flanks visible,” she said quietly. “There may be a trap before we reach Keskor.”

  “I saw Devrilinum,” Lissus replied. He did not give her any title; instead he seemed to speak to her as an equal. That was something else in his favour. Cassia was beginning to like his blunt nature, even as she felt guilty for having led him into a mission that would surely end in his death.

  The March wound through the hillsides, pastures and woodlands fading in and out of sight in the murk. At times Cassia could have thrown a stone and have it disappear from sight before it struck the ground. Minutes later she might glance over her shoulder and be able to see the entire length of her column. It was difficult to judge how far they had come, or how long they had been marching. The lack of sunlight had dislodged her sense of time days before, and the mists disguised every yard of terrain to such an extent that Cassia only found her bearings when she encountered a waystone that she had once camped behind when her father had been too drunk to continue travelling.

  The land was shrunken and yet stretched out, thinned so much she thought she could pull apart the fabric of the earth with her bare hands and drop through to some dimension of hell beneath. It was easy to imagine the whole of Hellea like this: the fertile, arable lands of the basin around the Castaria bleak and shrivelled, the towns deserted, the rivers reduced to pale effluent.

  Another visit from Lissus broke the monotony of the journey. This time even he looked faintly troubled by what he had seen ahead. Cassia halted the column and the shieldmen formed a circle around the scouts as they dropped to their haunches to rest. Cassia followed Lissus and three of his men out of the temporary camp, down a crumbling bank at the side of the road. She had a vague memory of this being a field from which Keskor’s southern gates were visible on a clear morning, but at that moment the mists had closed in again and after a few yards the bank itself was little more than a dim shape behind them.

  “Someone’s playing tricks,” Lissus said. He had lit a torch already; now he used it to set another aflame and passed it to her. Then he gestured into the field.

  For a moment Cassia could not tell what she ought to be looki
ng at. This was pasture land, thick with gorse and heathers, all leeched of colour by the mists. Clumps of trees framed the scene, brittle and denuded.

  “Cattle,” Lissus pointed out.

  Then Cassia saw them. Without the flesh to bulk out their bodies, the cattle were no more than bare skeletons, set amongst the bushes as though the herd had been caught in the act of grazing. Every ounce of meat, every strip of skin, had been assiduously removed, leaving nothing but white, unmarked bone. And yet the dead beasts stood in place on all four legs, unsupported, their necks bowed as if to tear at the grasses. Cassia brought the torch closer to the nearest skeleton, staring with cold fascination at the ribcage and the bent length of the spine. She could not see how the bones remained connected.

  “It should not stand,” she said. She pulled her hand back, suddenly aware that she had been far too close to touching one of the stark lengths of the thing’s ribs. The hindquarters looked impossible – they should have collapsed without the musculature that flesh would have provided.

  “Sorcery,” Lissus muttered.

  Cassia had to agree. Surely nothing else could have cleaned the bones of these poor animals without leaving any kind of mark. Neither claw nor knife had been used here.

  She stepped back cautiously, half-expecting the skeleton to turn and peer eyelessly at her. Another half dozen of the dead animals were spread across the land close by, and yet more stood deeper within the pasture. All had been left with their bones intact, like studies for a macabre illumination. But there was nothing in any of the stories Cassia had ever heard to compare with this. Any artist who drew such things would certainly be cast out, his work burned to ashes.

  She remembered the timbers of Devrilinum: rotting, aged and withered in a fashion that time alone could not match. Caenthell’s mists had sucked the town dry. Cassia wondered if they had done the same to this herd. And, if they had, then perhaps poor Teon and his fellows had suffered the same fate. She shivered at the thought.

  Lissus had said something. She lifted her head and looked across at him.

  “It’s making fun of us,” he repeated. “Mocking us.”

  Cassia nodded slowly. Yes, she could see that. Jedrell was showing her the forces he had at his command. Showing her how all her efforts would end.

  “What should we do with them?”

  “Nothing,” she told him after a moment’s thought. “They can’t hurt us. And it would be . . . irreverent to smash them to the ground.”

  Lissus’s stare was unreadable, but he lowered his torch and took a deep breath. “It knows we are coming.”

  Cassia nodded again. “But the High King must still deal with the other two prongs of our attack. He cannot concentrate on us alone. This is a warning, but his attention has been forced elsewhere.”

  To Gethista, and to Rais, wherever he was now. Cassia forced herself to stop thinking about him.

  “Keskor isn’t far away now,” she said, with far more confidence than she felt. “Come on, let’s see if we can spoil Jedrell’s games.”

  Familiar landmarks, twisted and flattened by the endless gloom. Cassia recognised the pile of stones by the side of the road only by the neatly squared-off steps that surrounded it. The last time she had passed this way, that pile had been a small offertory shrine to the gods of wind and rain; farmers set sacrifices there to ward against poor harvests. More than once Norrow had swept up the crumbs and rinds that remained, after a particularly poor journey to Keskor. He’d had to wait until after dark, of course, by which time the four-legged or winged scavengers of the fields had already made off with the choicest unburned food.

  Now the shrine stood in ruins, abandoned by all the gods. The heavy stone table that generations of farmers had made offerings upon was cracked, as though Pyraete himself had come in fury with the great hammer with which he had forged the hearts of the mountains. It was the same at every other small altar she had seen on their journey northwards, all but those sacred to Pyraete himself. They, at least, remained untouched.

  It lent more weight to Hetch’s tale of his encounter with Norrow. Not that Cassia had ever believed Hetch to be a liar. Dishonest, perhaps, but not a liar. Ceresel was a fickle goddess at the best of times, and what good fortune the goddess had bestowed on Cassia over the last year was due in full, and with more interest than any bonebreaking backstreet moneylender.

  “Less than half a mile now,” she told Lissus quietly.

  The scout had reined in his men, keeping them strictly within sight of the main column of shieldmen. Aside from short breaks to chew on dried strips of meat they had hardly paused at all, and Cassia could see the toll the long march was taking on them. She was exhausted herself, but she knew that if she stopped for more than ten minutes or so, she would never want to continue. It was important to keep the impetus of the journey for as long as she could – before she had a chance to think rationally about what she was doing.

  Even so, she felt the pace of their march slow as they approached the town. She measured the tread of the shieldmen against the steady hammering of the war drums in her head and realised the stone soldiers had done this of their own accord, readying themselves for trouble. After what had happened in Devrilinum she could not blame them at all, but the fact of their own awareness was troubling in itself. If the shieldmen were more intelligent than she or even Malessar had given them credit for, then did she have the right to order them into this fight?

  A more worrying thought crossed Cassia’s mind: might the shieldmen be capable of refusing such an order? Or – if it came to it and she told them to leave her and save themselves, would they refuse to follow that order?

  She shook her head and stared up at the heavy clouds, as though she might find the answer there. She guessed even if she had some means to ask Malessar, he would not know. And Craw? If the dragon knew, it would not tell her.

  When the walls of Keskor emerged from the murk, Cassia was actually glad for the distraction they provided. It was evident that the town had fallen: the rooftops were jagged, outlined by a haze in the air that did not belong there, and after seeing Devrilinum close up Cassia knew the feel of a town under the High King’s rule.

  From what Hetch had told her, the fighting here must have been fierce. Rann Almoul would not have given up the work of his lifetime easily.

  “Do we enter?” Lissus asked.

  Cassia hesitated, but she knew there was no real choice in the matter. “We have to. I think this is the last place we’ll be able to gather firewood. We have to risk it.”

  For once the scout looked surprised. “Surely there are woods further up the road. We have enough torches for now.”

  “No.” Cassia paused again, wondering how much to tell him of her rough – probably suicidal – plan. “We have to keep moving quickly once we are past Keskor. We won’t have time to cut branches. The High King will have done our job for us here. We can just pick the splintered frames up from the streets.”

  “Interesting.” Lissus plucked thoughtfully at his top lip. For a moment he looked ready to say more, but then he ducked away and signalled to his junior officers instead, passing orders in short, brisk tones.

  Cassia took the opportunity to clear her mind and direct her thoughts upwards.

  Craw.

  Cassia Cat’s-Paw. The dragon’s voice was quiet.

  Tell me how Havinal fares.

  He has found Gethista. Now he fortifies it and sets fires.

  That was good. Havinal was as professional a soldier as any of those from the old stories had been, and even if he did not understand why he had been sent there, he would do as he had been ordered.

  And tell me of Rais.

  He rides. Hard.

  Cassia glared into the clouds, but Craw remained unseen. The dragon was laughing at her, she thought. Trying to trick her into asking another question when she knew her debt was already far too large.

  She picked her next words carefully. The High King is distracted, then.

 
; For now, at least.

  She envisioned dragonfire, bursting through the skies above the southern slopes of the mountains, where the Dragontail Pass ought to be, the mist recoiling and burning away where the fire touched it. Jedrell would feel that burning; he would concentrate on Rais and Feyenn, and on Havinal’s camp at Gethista, and with any luck he would not see Cassia’s own approach as a direct threat.

  She drew Lissus’s attention again. “Into Keskor,” she said. “As carefully and as quietly as Pelicos on the virgin’s roof.”

  That drew muted smiles from the scouts. Cassia hoped they would still be smiling when Keskor’s broken stones were left safely behind them.

  It was worse than Devrilinum. The spectres of the North had spent their force against the town, and then settled into the stones, the wood, and the very earth under Cassia’s feet. She thought of the dusty soil that the winds blew everywhere in Galliarca, in which only the hardiest of plants could ever take root, but here the ground was still dark and thick, more like clay than anything else, just as she remembered it. The difference now was that she could sense how lifeless Jedrell’s grasp had left the earth.

  The houses were so tumbled into ruin that she only recognised fragments of the town. There was a house where her father had once brawled over two thin pennies, now slumped to one side as though the walls themselves required support.

  On another road there was a bath house that she had taken shelter in several times when storms caught her in the open. The owners had allowed her to dry herself with a rag in return for menial work scrubbing the benches. They had watched her like hawks the entire time; her father’s reputation was such that they probably feared she would run off with their patrons’ clothing. The humiliation was nothing compared to being able to stay dry and warm for a while longer. Today the baths had been levelled, the front wall collapsed into the street and the interior walls pulled to pieces. Withered wood jutted out from the rubble: shards of the benches Cassia had polished in another life.

  The scouts followed the shieldmen’s lead, walking in silence through the devastation, torches lit and arrows nocked. Despite the fact that the land itself was dead – nothing would grow here for years to come, Cassia judged – she could already envisage the town sinking into the ground in exactly the same manner as Gethista must have done. Perhaps in centuries to come people would walk over the town in ignorance of its presence beneath their feet. That possibility, however, relied upon her winning this fight.