The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  Lissus paused to examine the wood that protruded from the wrecked bath house, prodding it gently with the tip of a knife. When flakes crumbled from the planking he grimaced and shook his head, moving on quickly to hunt for something that had not been subjected so much to Caenthell’s diseased touch.

  Cassia kept between the twin lines of shieldmen, as she had done at Devrilinum. It was no guarantee of safety, of course, but she was aware of the pressure at the base of her neck and the dull thudding of the drums. Jedrell was a distant presence for now, watching events at Gethista and the Dragontail Pass, yet she knew he might change his focus as capriciously as the mountain winds. She wanted to pass through Keskor quickly, before he turned his eye in her direction once more.

  Her horse was just as eager, though for different reasons. Hemmed in by torch-bearing stone soldiers, in a town that smelled of ages of decay, the poor beast was more skittish than a cat next to running water. Cassia had to keep the reins tight in one hand, resting her free hand on the horse’s neck in an attempt to reassure it. So far it seemed to be working, but the flat sound of hooves on the stones in the street were jarring her own nerves and there was nobody here who could keep her calmed.

  Despite the ruined state of the town, the scouts managed to find at least some small supplies of wood as they neared the central market. The pieces they scavenged would not fully replenish what they had burned so far, but it was better than nothing.

  Her horse snorted loudly, tossing its head to loosen the reins and turning on the spot as if to flee. With Lissus’s help Cassia managed to hold it in place, but the spooked animal refused to head any further up the street.

  “Trouble ahead then,” Lissus muttered, the first words he’d spoken since entering Keskor.

  Cassia did not need any prompting to remember what had happened at Devrilinum. Jedrell might be otherwise distracted, but he would not have left Keskor undefended. She glanced around, taking a moment to dredge through her memories.

  “There’s a way past the market square,” she said. “It may take longer. And the streets are much narrower.” It avoided most of the temples as well, she didn’t add: even from here she could see that the tall column that had stood before the Factor’s grand house had been toppled, and that did not bode well for the rest of that district, where the temples and the homes of the other rich Hellean families were located.

  Lissus glanced at the rest of his company, as if judging the strength of their spirits. He came to a decision quickly enough, however. “Lead on.”

  Other memories resurfaced as she led the column through the maze of streets and small yards that made up the old town of Keskor. These were the sorts of hovels that her father’s acquaintances had dwelt in. She was surprised to see that they looked less affected by the leeching mists than the rest of the town, maybe since they had already been ramshackle and skeletal to begin with. The rubbish that lay in the road could have been left there at midday in the summer, rather than scattered by Jedrell’s forces. If his storytelling had proved mildly profitable, then this was where Norrow would proceed to spend, gamble and lose the coins that could have given both of them a roof over their heads for much more than a single, occasional night.

  Cassia had no reason to linger. There was nothing to look for though, paradoxically, the scouts made a better haul of firewood and kindling here than they had in the wider streets near the gates. She had to pause once or twice to let them collect the wood into manageable bundles and parcel them out amongst the shieldmen but otherwise she let her anxious horse trot ahead at a faster pace, relying on her knowledge of the streets to guide the column around the dark heart of the town.

  The shieldmen increased their own pace too, even without a spoken order. Perhaps they were as eager as she was to put Keskor behind them.

  There was a sound from somewhere ahead, something that could not be attributed to the gradual settling of the deteriorated town. Lissus had plainly heard it too, his spine curving as he bent into a defensive posture. A sharp gesture brought the pair of men behind him up against the sides of the surrounding buildings, arrows nocked and pulled back so that the fletchings touched their cheeks.

  Cassia realised that she was still in the middle of the road, in the open. She was hauling at the reins to bring her horse about so her shieldmen could pass by to cover her when the horsemen burst out from a side-street further ahead. Dusty, ragged and muddied, chased by clouds of dirt and mist, they turned straight for her, riders hunched low over their withers.

  The scouts let fly with their arrows before Cassia could draw enough breath to shout. One of the horses reared, a shaft stuck high in its shoulder; the other shaft sank deep into a mouldering timber frame. A wall of unwavering spear points brought the new arrivals up short, and the man leading the squad waved a hand in the air.

  “Hold!” he shouted. “Hold!”

  It was Rais, Cassia thought in cold shock. Rais – here in Keskor.

  Even Lissus’s composure was cracked. “My lord?”

  The prince’s gaze swept across them all until he found her. His mouth quirked into a harried smile. “Kolus’s balls, but you’re difficult to catch up to, Cassia.”

  She felt the muscles of her neck and shoulders stiffening into solid lead, and a small furnace burning white hot at the back of her mind.

  Rais looked about again, firing off quick orders to the riders milling behind him, before returning his attention to Cassia and Lissus. “You shouldn’t be exploring these slums. This whole town is too dangerous. The main square is some kind of charnel house. And the mists are rising up too – I think they know we are here. Come on; the Upper Gate is this way, I believe.”

  He hauled his horse around without waiting for her reply, gesticulating and shouting again. His riders clattered up the slight slope of the street, shattering the unearthly quiet of the town. Little wonder, Cassia thought sourly, that Jedrell was aware of his presence.

  Lissus was waiting for her. Cassia drew in a deep breath and tried to keep the weight of her anger from her voice. “Follow them,” she said.

  “What, in the names of all the gods, do you think you are doing?” Cassia stared up at the prince, her hot fury even silencing the mocking beat of the High King’s war drums. “I told you to go to the Dragontail Pass. You agreed. You went. So what in hell’s name are you doing here? Do you realise what this means? Are you really as stubborn and as stupid as your father? Well?”

  Rais folded his arms. His smile was thin and fixed, a diplomatic fiction. Lissus and the others lurked at the edge of earshot, pretending they could neither see nor hear what was happening as they combined their forces and prepared for the next stages of the journey into Caenthell.

  “I had hoped for a warmer welcome,” Rais said. His tone was light, but Cassia could tell that at least one of her barbs had struck home.

  “Why should you?” she retorted. “I planned to distract the High King from this route into the North. Now he has twice as many reasons to look at Keskor and Karakhel, just because you could not do as you were told. Because you thought to look after your own interests.”

  “Untrue, and unfair,” Rais said, more sharply. “Haemon is as good a man as I am in this terrain. Better, in fact. He can find the Dragontail Pass far quicker without my presence as a hindrance. He still has all of the men you sent with us, Cassia. And the dragon, too, though I suspect Haemon wishes that beast would follow me rather than him.”

  Cassia blinked, her anger tripped up by that revelation. “But . . . these riders?”

  She turned and looked at the company more closely. There were not more than a score of horsemen in total, all of them as lightly equipped as her scouts were. Cloaked and hooded, they appeared to be outlaws more than soldiers, none of them carrying a legion’s banner or wearing identifying sigils. Her heart sank as she saw Ultess amongst their number, a solid rock around which the others moved. If Ultess was here, then Arca was too, and everything she had done to keep him out of harm’s way was fru
itless.

  Rais gripped her arm and pulled her back to face him. “They came with me. I did not ask them to. Understand that, before you say anything else.”

  Cassia twisted free. “That still does not answer my question, Rais. Why are you doing this?”

  Rais sighed. “I would have thought that was obvious, Cassia. We are here to help you.”

  “I don’t want your help. I don’t need it. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “Now who is being stubborn?” Rais took her arm again and led her further away from the company, towards the ring of shieldmen that surrounded the makeshift camp. “Credit me with some intelligence, Cassia. We all know what you were trying to achieve back at that council. This is your fault, you say, so only you can make things right. And there is danger, so you will not put your friends in harm’s way. Why else would you relegate me to little more than a distraction, on the periphery of the battle? Why else would you leave everybody who means anything at all to you behind at Gethista, beyond the boundaries of Caenthell? This is all your fault, you say, so you are punishing yourself by assuming the burden of responsibility alone. You cannot allow yourself to be anything other than wholly miserable, so you cut yourself off from support and friendship.”

  Now Cassia could hear the edge of anger and hurt in his voice. Rais was not as good at hiding his emotions as he pretended to be.

  “But if you come with me then I am responsible,” she protested. “And I can’t do that. Not for all of you. This is no game, Rais. Nor is it a story. At the end of it people will die.” She thought of the Lyrissan priest, Dorias; Teon and his men; Rann and Vescar Almoul; even Baum. She did not want to add any more names to that list.

  “If the gods fate it so, then we will die,” Rais said. “As it was, so it will be. Peleanna blows life into our bodies, and Kolus returns us to the clay. But if I am to die, then it will be through my own choice, Cassia, not yours. You may have the chance to tell this story once it is done, but it is not yours to make. It is my decision to be here.”

  “And Arca? Ultess?”

  He nodded. “They are their own men. As are the others. Even the boy Hetch.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. “Hetch? Oh gods, I killed his brother . . .”

  Rais quirked one corner of his mouth. “Not the legion’s greatest loss, so I heard.”

  “Stop it, Rais. This is no laughing matter.”

  “Then what is? If you wish to be serious, Cassia, then think on how you would wish to die. Alone, or amongst friends?”

  “That’s unfair!”

  The prince shrugged. “No more so than the manner in which you have treated us.”

  Cassia sighed. Her fury was slowly transmuting itself into a raw, throbbing resignation, and she rubbed tiredly at her temples. “I wanted you all to be safe.”

  “But you cannot command us to be safe,” Rais said. “It is as Kolus once said: A man without friends will fail, just as a house without foundations will fall. You might accuse me of only looking after my own interests, Cassia, but you are wrong. I am looking after you.”

  She closed her eyes and let brilliant red and black patterns dance across the blackness. Rais’s hand was warm upon her arm, no longer squeezing so tight that it hurt. Cassia lifted her other hand to prise his fingers away, letting them entwine with her own instead. She wanted – she needed – to send him away, to send them all back down towards the relative safety of Gethista, yet she knew already that she would not. Rais was right, damn him: she needed company far more than she had made herself believe.

  Pelicos might have scaled every wall, tackled every demonic beast from the depths of the foul earth, won the hearts of all around him, but he had never done so alone. It took Cassia only a few moments to shuffle through a list of his most important tales, as well as those of Gelis and half a dozen more of her father’s narrative staples. People remembered those names, those heroes, and they cheered every fantastic deed and ferocious battle, but the more she thought on it she more she realised that the likes of Pelicos and Gelis were never actually alone in their adventures. They always had friends, companions, allies. Like-minded adventurers to complement their abilities. To share in the dangers as well as the glories.

  People like Arca and Ultess, she thought, suddenly ashamed by the manner in which she had dismissed them. And like Rais too, of course.

  Cassia exhaled, long and slow, and let her anger out with her breath. “I can’t possibly stop you, can I, you fool?”

  “Not without violence,” the prince said. His tone was deceptively light, but Cassia felt his weight shift as though he was readying himself for another outburst.

  “The gods forbid that I should hit a prince of Galliarca,” she muttered under her breath.

  Rais snorted. “I will allow you to join our company if you wish.”

  She smiled despite herself and turned awkwardly to brush her lips across his hand. Something that, only a few weeks ago, she would never have imagined doing. Or, perhaps more accurately, that she could only have imagined with Meredith in the prince’s place.

  “Thank you. I would be honoured,” she said, with honesty.

  Then she saw the small brooch Rais had pinned to his thick cloak. A speared apple, illuminated by stars. It was far too cheap and scratched to be one of his own possessions, and she had never seen him wearing it before. But she recognised it nonetheless, from all the time she had spent with Arca. And now Rais held out a similar brooch to her, too.

  Her new-found mood evaporated as suddenly as it had arrived. “Guhl’s Company?”

  Rais shrugged. “It seemed appropriate.”

  “But . . .” Cassia could only shake her head for a moment. Not only Arca, and Ultess – but their half-captain too. Her grandfather. All of the surviving members of Guhl’s Company had returned to the North for one final battle. Cassia did not need the weight of the stories in her head to know how this would end.

  She looked past Rais to where the other riders were gathered. Sure enough, though Arca and Ultess hung back in the hope of remaining unseen, Attis sat, tired but proud, in his saddle, a short sword at his side and a pair of spears strapped across his back. The gear had to have been borrowed, as so much of it did not fit him. But this man was no longer Attis the moneylender. This was Attis, the half-captain of Guhl’s Company, come again to reclaim his past.

  Her anger died in the cold realisation that this was exactly what she had been thinking only a few moments before. She needed companions worthy of a hero’s story, and the gods had seen fit to provide them for her. An army of shieldmen, and Guhl’s Company.

  Oh Ceresel, she thought. You bitch.

  23

  For the first time that day, there was the suggestion of a wind, and the sensation of weight overhead. The clouds billowed in response. The dragon roared, an exhalation of flame, the heat touching Cassia’s skin even from a distance. Her horse skipped aside, so thoroughly unnerved that it took a minute or more to force the poor animal back onto the path.

  There had been other such blooms, evidence of battles against the High King’s ever-strengthening presence. Some ahead, some behind, some so faint Cassia could only imagine them to be the distant traces of attacks by Alcibaber or Feyenn, designed to draw the High King’s attention away from her. Dragonfire illuminated the soulless skies for brief seconds, alleviating one corner or another of the unrelenting gloom, until Caenthell’s presence rolled back in again.

  Ultess muttered a dark oath under his breath as he passed by. Of all her company, he seemed the most intimidated by the dragons. Craw’s intermittent appearances overhead were as random as those of Feyenn and Alcibaber elsewhere, but while most of the other soldiers had become more or less accustomed to this new style of magical warfare, the former barkeep was unsettled to the point of distraction. Cassia suspected only the fact that he and Arca were inseparable companions had kept him on the road this far.

  As much as she sympathised with him, the dragons’ flights were an important part of
Cassia’s plans. She could sense the drums were somehow . . . distracted – that the malign forces at the heart of Caenthell were focused far more on what was happening further to the east and west, just as she hoped they would be. Craw’s occasional interventions overhead were designed to draw attention away from her company, rather than towards it.

  With her horse finally more settled, Cassia took her bearings again. The lines of shieldmen, divided now into half a dozen columns spaced across the hillside, marched relentlessly through the withered land. The columns faded into grey as they moved away from her, seeming to become part of the land, just as they had been once before.

  Lissus’s men flitted in and out of view, between the rigid lines of stone soldiers. The scouts still carried tied bundles of firewood and scavenged frames across their backs, and they appeared to be nothing more than a pack of armed tinkers. Only a few days ago that thought would have amused her, but now Cassia only marked it for possible future use, her humour thoroughly depressed by her surroundings.

  Even Rais’s presence failed to lift her spirits any longer. And that made her even more miserable.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, the prince turned his own horse aside and waited for her to catch up. The nearest column of shieldmen veered a degree or two from their path to pass around him, paying him as little attention as they would a ditch or an outcrop of rocks.

  “How far do these mountains stretch?” he wondered aloud.

  Cassia shrugged. They had passed the last of the quarries the previous day. They were now abandoned but for the bones that some foul intelligence had left arrayed in bizarre patterns upon the ground. The trail that led up to the more remote sheepfolds had disappeared over a rise shortly after that. Now her company marched through lands that even the Factor had never seen fit to garrison. Bleak stone lands, unsuited to any sort of farming, uninhabited by all but the most foolhardy of men.