by Steven Poore
Craw had brought her to the boundary of Caenthell the last time she had travelled this way, she remembered, and that had been further up the mountainside. If it was closer to more civilised lands then Caenthell would surely have been rediscovered by now, but Cassia guessed the terms of Malessar’s curse, combined with the sheer inaccessibility of the land itself, had prevented any such discovery.
Baum had suggested there were lands to the far north of the mountains too; that he had escaped in that direction with Jedrell’s child. Cassia had wondered more than once if that meant those lands were suffering their own invasion from Caenthell, but the idea was too great for her to fully grasp. She concentrated instead on the fact that they marched ever upwards, deeper into the mountains, closer to the heart of the High King’s evil. The air became colder by the hour, the ground more barren, and still she did not recognise any landmark at all.
Rais set his horse to walk alongside her own. Cassia felt him watching her, trying to judge whether she could continue, how soon he should call a temporary halt to the march.
“I wonder what the view would be like from here,” the prince mused. “On a clear day, of course. I wonder how much of your North we might see.”
“It’s not my North,” Cassia said.
“Of course.” Rais paused for a moment. “But it is your home.”
This time she lifted her head to look at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“I am saying it wrong,” Rais corrected himself. “You were born to this land, and you will fight to the death for it, but you do not love it.”
Cassia thought for a long moment. She was certain that at some point she had loved the North enough to differentiate it from the rest of Hellea, and to wish it free of the Emperor’s yoke. Why else would she have leaped at the chance to join Baum’s quest to achieve that very thing? But as much as she tried, she could not bring to mind anything she loved about any of the towns of the North. If there were any happy memories at all, they had all been drowned out by the few happy months she had spent in Galliarca. That city was a festival of colour, taste and bright sounds. There, she had felt she was her own person, master of her own fate, even if that had finally proved to be little more than an illusion.
“If you are trying to convince me to turn around and leave the North to ruin, you are doing a better job than you might think.”
Rais shook his head. “If you were going to run, then you would have done so long ago,” he said. “You are not that kind of person.”
He seemed more certain of that than she was herself. “So what sort of person am I, Rais?”
“A fighter. A warrior. A queen.”
She could not keep the surprise from her voice. “That’s . . .”
Rais cut across her protestations. “No, that is what you are. That is why I say this is your North. Do you think men such as Havinal would follow you merely if I told them to? None of them could have defended this land any better. In fact I would say that none of them would have made it this far.”
Surprise gave way to colder caution. Cassia felt the pit opening before her. “What are you trying to say, Rais?”
Once more he wore a faint smile, but this time Cassia thought she could read him a little better. This was not the same prince – cocksure, flamboyant, capricious – she had first encountered in Galliarca. The Rais beside her now was more solid, more reliable in many ways. Stubborn, yes, irritatingly so, but he also treated Cassia as his equal. And this conversation, she realised abruptly, was his way of making certain she knew that.
Embarrassment. That’s what was hidden in his smile. Of course, what man would ever want to admit a mere girl as his equal?
Rais lifted a hand dismissively. “Hah. It does not matter, I suppose. We can speak of it another time.”
He had raised his guard again, just like that. Cassia sighed. “I would like that, Rais. But . . . do not leave it too long to do so.”
There was a shout from the head of the column; the signal for a halt passed back from Lissus’s position. The shieldmen began to merge their lines into a single arcing perimeter as Cassia and Rais urged their mounts forward.
Lissus stood with a quartet of his scouts at the foot of a small but plainly man-made mound, crowned with an unadorned stone plinth. An altar, a shrine to the long-faded god of the North. She had seen such altars hidden and overgrown by weeds along the roads throughout her years of travelling, where they had not been toppled or destroyed by the Helleans to weaken Pyraete’s hold on the land.
But the Helleans had never ventured so deep into the mountains, never come in search of Caenthell itself. So it was little surprise to see such a shrine still intact.
What had alarmed Lissus, however, was obvious even before the mound emerged fully from the grey murk that restricted visibility in every direction. The shrine had darkened, rejecting the flat shades of the landscape around it to turn towards sheer blackness, as though hewn from charcoal, rather than stone. It drew attention to itself by its very existence. Staring at it for more than a moment made Cassia think of standing on the crumbling edge of a dark chasm, feeling her weight unbalance her and topple her over the edge . . .
She felt Rais’s hand on her arm and realised he was trying to pull her back from the bottom of the mound. The drums in her head were quiescent, as though the intelligence behind them was waiting for something to happen.
“It is not natural,” Lissus muttered. He thumbed the edge of his sword blade.
“Of course it is not natural.” Another voice cut through the air.
Cassia forced herself to loosen her grip on the reins. The leather straps had cut deep into her palms. She lifted her chin at the figure that made its way towards them from behind the mound.
“Craw.”
“Cassia.” The dragon smiled. She could not help but note that the body of this human form now seemed formed from scales, far more than skin. Craw’s movements were heavier, more considered than they had been before. Now he had weight as well as presence.
“The border is ten miles away,” the dragon said.
Cassia considered her words carefully. “You must have seen Karakhel.”
“Yes.” Craw paused, then shrugged. “It stands.”
“Good. Then we will meet again there, if Jedrell remains occupied elsewhere.” She felt the dragon scrutinising her, searching for a way back into her thoughts, but the drums had built an effective shield. This close to Caenthell, he could not penetrate them.
“What is this damned thing?” Rais asked abruptly. Cassia could have slapped him for interrupting, for doing the one thing he must know never to do to a dragon – to ask a question, for Ceresel’s sake – but Craw only looked at Rais for a long moment before shrugging once more, as though the question had not been directed at him.
“Jedrell is long centuries dead,” the dragon said. “He is not your problem.”
Cassia bit down hard on the obvious question, hoping Rais also had enough sense to keep his mouth closed. She shot a warning glare at him and the prince scowled back.
The dragon paced slowly around the foot of the shrine, one hand curled above its surface as if to caress it, but Cassia noticed that Craw never touched the terrifying black stone. Patterns swirled there – reflections, she thought for a moment, before remembering that without the light of the sun there was nothing to be reflected.
“This is a sign of Caenthell’s blight,” Craw said. Perhaps he was answering Rais’s question after all, but he paid the prince no attention as he spoke. “These shrines were raised up from the heart of the mountains. They resonate with that dark heart. If you were to cut the flesh of the land deep enough, you would discover that this was the bone underneath.”
“That makes no sense,” Rais said, but the words were directed to Cassia, more than to Craw.
She shook her head, remembering the visions that had haunted her dreams since leaving Hellea to come back to the North. The earth shifting beneath her feet, seeming in some manner to be
living, breathing flesh. An infected body. A great, malevolent beast buried in the ground, slowly breaking free of the prison in which it had been bound for countless years. Shivering, she remembered the great eye that had stared out at her. It had seen her. It had recognised her.
It knows we are coming anyway. But she kept that thought to herself.
“Many things in this world make no sense, young prince.” Craw smiled. “And yet humans still try to categorise and rationalise them. Your philosophies are merely the act of failing to understand that.”
Rais bristled, and Cassia reached over to tug his sleeve. She had no idea what the dragon meant, but she did not intend to let herself be riled by his condescension. There were far more urgent matters to take care of.
“I have no interest in philosophy,” she said, before Rais could butt in. “I want to know what you mean by saying that Jedrell is not a problem.”
She stared into the dragon’s eyes, confident that there was no actual question in her words.
Craw continued to step around the shrine, still avoiding touching the black stone, but Cassia was nonetheless certain he was probing it with other senses. With delicate caresses of sorcery perhaps, if the sour metallic tang at the back of her mouth was any indication.
Lissus shifted nervously at the edge of her vision; the other scouts had retreated even further once the dragon appeared. Even the more hardened veterans of the reconstituted Guhl’s Company looked close to bolting. It wasn’t just Craw himself, Cassia thought, looking around her company in an effort to reassure them that she was still nominally in control of the situation. The shrine to Pyraete was sucking confidence from them all.
This is not a restful place.
Craw stopped walking suddenly and Cassia found that she could not meet his mocking gaze. “No, you do not want to know,” he said. “And I shall not spoil the surprise for you. Karakhel awaits you, Cassia Cat’s-Paw.”
The dragon turned on his heel and strode away up the side of the hill, disappearing into a bank of fog that had risen from the ground before him. Cassia felt the pressure of ancient sorcery once again, and guessed he had conjured up the cloud to cover his transformation.
Rais exhaled with a heartfelt curse. “I could happily cut out his tongue,” he muttered, “but I suspect the bastard possesses more than one.”
Cassia ignored him, instead summoning what she thought of as the shieldmen’s commanding officer. Its upper body was chipped, damaged by time itself as well as by the brief encounter with the mists at Devrilinum, and Cassia had come to recognise it by the small v-shaped cleft at the corner of one motionless eye.
“Take the lead,” she told it.
It – and the half-dozen shieldmen that always followed it – moved without hesitation, and only a moment later the rest of her stone army was marching onwards. The human elements, however, seemed less inclined to move. Hetch, and the other young fools who had chosen to join Guhl’s Company, still stared at the black shrine, apparently mesmerised by the stone’s apparent depth. She could feel it dragging at her sense of balance. No wonder Rais had felt the need to pull her back from it.
Even her veterans were affected by the shrine’s force. Arca was as pale as she had ever seen him; his lips moved and he shook his head at intervals as though the damned thing spoke to him. Ultess was the same, and some of the others too. Her grandfather sat with his head bowed, either weeping or praying.
Cassia raised her voice. “We are leaving,” she said. “Lissus, Attis – listen to me.”
It was a matter of urgency now, she realised without humour. She had set her shieldmen in motion, and she had no intention of leaving herself behind, let alone anybody else.
She dug her fist into Rais’s arm until he swore again. “Get everybody moving.”
“As you wish,” the prince muttered, rubbing his arm.
Between them they managed to herd the rest of her company away from the black shrine and, much to Cassia’s relief, the debilitating effect of the horrible stone was lessened with distance. Not that anybody was made much happier by the knowledge that they were so close to Karakhel, but Cassia noticed that even in this ceaseless gloom some of the colour and energy returned to them.
At Rais’s suggestion she made certain that her vanguard of shieldmen would warn her if any more of these ancient shrines marked the road into Caenthell. They would have to navigate carefully around the things if that was the case, to avoid being drained again in such a manner.
“The closer we get to your black land,” Rais pointed out, “the more effect these shrines will have. They must be like growths that poison the body.”
Cassia could only agree with him. She cursed herself for a fool for not having thought of the consequences first, and again for not realising how much she really needed Rais and the others with her. A third curse for the fact that she was cursing herself so much seemed almost too much and she actually laughed aloud, making Rais stare at her incredulously.
“Have I ever heard you laugh?” he wondered.
The moment passed all too quickly; Cassia shook her head as the weight returned to her shoulders once more. They rode in silence for a while longer.
“Ten miles,” Rais said at last.
“More than that,” Cassia pointed out. “Karakhel lies at the border.”
Rais looked up into the sky, as if expecting to see Craw’s silhouette drift through the dark clouds overhead. “I don’t trust it.”
“You believe that I do? I think Craw wanted to see how we measured up against whatever it was that controlled the shrine.” She did not want to speak its name. “Craw knows our success is not guaranteed. It will not ally itself with a losing side.”
The stories of the Age of Talons were rife with betrayals and shifting alliances. Any man in those tales who relied on the loyalty of a dragon was a man begging to be let down.
Rais watched her now. “Somehow you convinced it you would not lose. You are a far better storyteller than you give yourself credit for.”
That made Cassia smile. “An honest compliment! Who would have guessed I should come so far for one of those?”
If the land remained unfamiliar to her, Cassia at least recognised the sharp edge of sensation that caused her to shiver as she made her way up another winding pathway towards the top of the next hill. She looked up and saw that the advance guard of shieldmen waited for her at the top, motionless and cold, their backs to her.
She passed her reins to one of the nearest scouts and pushed on ahead, past Ultess as he struggled on the slope’s unforgiving switchback, up to where the shieldmen stood. Lissus and Hetch had already gained the summit, and Cassia heard her grandfather’s rasping cough further down the slope, towards the bottom. Rais was there too, taking his turn as the rearguard and allowing his own horse to rest before it suffered the ascent.
The stones of Karakhel’s border fortress stood proud on the promontory further down the slope. Quiet, undisturbed, as if she had only left them behind her the day before. Cassia half-expected to see a ghostly figure standing atop the keep, watching for invaders. The fact that it still stood disturbed her – hadn’t the fortress fallen to Caenthell’s mists, after all? Why would they have left the walls intact? A trap, perhaps . . .
“It’s real,” Hetch said. He sounded almost stupid in his disbelief, like a small boy. She stole a glance at him and realised he was not as grown up as he had pretended to be. Running parts of his father’s business had been a game to him, just as much as having her as a slave would have been a novelty. In time, he would have tired of being his father’s errand boy, and he would have become bored with her too.
“Of course it is,” she said. “I told you: I have been here before.”
“All this time,” Hetch continued, following her down the hillside. The shieldmen began to march, three long lines behind them both, the first army to invade Caenthell since the time of Jedrell himself. “All this time and nobody knew it was here. We all thought it just a story. Like
the dragons. Like Stromondor. Or Pelicos. If only we had known . . .”
Cassia halted abruptly, forcing him to pull up sharply or else tumble into her. She stared at him in disgust. “If you had known, what would you have done? This land was cursed, sealed away so that no man could live here. What would you have done, set those spirits free to destroy Hellea in the name of silver and gold?”
Hetch scowled. “How is that any different to what you did, except that your way was more foolish? We could have negotiated with . . . with whatever controls the mists. Your High King.”
She almost laughed. “Oh yes – the North will rise again, with Rann Almoul to guide it into prosperity! Hetch, this force is insane, driven mad by centuries of imprisonment. Even Malessar could not see a way to set it free. When we were here before, we were lucky to get out alive.”
“Then who is more insane?” Hetch demanded. “Me, for thinking to negotiate and at least save our lives? Or you for wanting to come back here and fight again, after you lost last time?”
For a moment she could not find the words to throw back at him. Then she gestured out to the lines of shieldmen, the scouts scattered amongst them, Guhl’s Company gathered at the top of the slope. “I would rather go through with this and risk death than spend the few remaining days of my life living with the knowledge that I had bowed my head to Caenthell for profit.” She spat out the last word as if it was a curse.
She started to turn away from him, then paused. “And if we had lost the fight on our first visit here, you and I would not be having this discussion now. Your bones would be sucked clean of flesh, alongside those of your father.”
Hetch paled and Cassia wondered distantly if she had gone too far. He pulled back, one shoulder lifting as though he intended to strike her. Perhaps he would have done, if a fierce shout from further up the hill had not drawn his attention.